Algo Poetry-Behind the Lines

The “Potter’s Wheel”, the 44th poem from BE.aGaIN ,is the dark, earthly matter, the matera of today’s Behind the Lines.The very word material has earthly, motherly origins.

It is a poem of being born and not wanting to be shaped at someone else’s wheel, or perhaps trying to break out of a last or a long cast cold mould.

I may also have had in my head, the book of Matthew and the “Potter’s field” or the “Potter’s field” from the classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” where George Bailey is shown what happens if he was never born and where others end up without his existence.The field just became a wheel maybe.

“Water and fire will not shape one born out of firewater”.

I have always been fiercely independent, or less politely put-bloody stubborn and will “resist any pedal”. In an age of uniform individualism and herd mentality, this can become tricky.

Those of us who grew up with narcissistic caregivers may recognise that they are the product of a sum that came with a remainder-“thrown together” in an under rehearsed recipe that turned “Insecurity into a permanent state”.

You are essentially the product of your genetics and your childhood environment.

This piece, as you will see with the remaining six works in this collection, shows an artistic turning point in the work. There is more rumination, reflection and a more meta-physical resolve to the concepts at play. The anger is more crafted, it’s fiery fire more focused.

In finishing the work,I was searching for an ending, having completed the first two verses of four lines each, and that brought us back to “clay” itself, which the poet didn’t want to be elevated above at the outset of the journey.

The garden of Eden, the original order out of chaos , the walled bountiful paradise with God as it’s groundsman, provided the answer-

“Return me to the garden, Innocence and where I belong”.

There is a longing as life lengthens to return to a simpler state of affairs, free of toil and back to the soil that you grew up from.

Join us tomorrow in the last week of the stories that shaped BE.aGaIN,

Algo.