How to Blow Glass – a poem by Deborah Leipziger

How to Blow Glass

Reach into the crucible
for a gather of molten glass 

                          to poise on your blow pipe.

Roll the glass on the wooden marver,
keep it in constant motion. 

                          Glass cannot rest.

Select from the 400 possible colors: tangerine   turquoise   
cobalt    amethyst

                          Roll the glass over the color. 

Return it to the glory hole,
let it glow like a candy apple.

                          Blowing glass requires another human.  

Slowly move the glass onto the punty. 
This transfer to another person is tricky.

                          Trust the passage of the glowing glass.    

Strike the glass so that is severs from your blow pipe. 
Then into the annealing oven at 960 degrees.

                          Glass is hard to rescue.

Speak the language of the sun
as you blow words into the gather. 

                          Blow prayers. 

Notice the flames on the inside of the glass. 
Cool off the other end of the blow pipe in a barrel of water.

                          Protect this slow cooling.  

You never know if the vessel will break.

Deborah Leipziger is an author, poet, and advisor on sustainability. Born in Brazil, Ms. Leipziger is the author of Story & Bone, published by Lily Poetry Review Books. Her poems have been published in ten countries in such magazines and journals as The Bombay Literary Review, Pangyrus, Salamander, Lily Poetry Review, and Revista Cardenal. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems. She is the Founder of the Lexicon of Change, a web-based platform devoted to the words we need for ecological and social transformation.