The Blind Sculptor
She is always at work inside of me,
delicate fingers sculpting delicately,
patiently plying the day’s pliable clay,
molding maquettes for the marble to be.
I wake in the night alone
and hear a faint tapping
of mallet on chisel,
breathe sea-mist
in marble dust, and yearn
for the more permanent forms
I know she is trapping.
Morning brings earthier news;
I feel her fingers
already working,
damp from the clay, tracing my ribs
with the smooth contours
of an unformed day.
If later I lose sight,
not sure that she’s there, her eyes always
surprise me, glints of stained glass
in blue windows, blind to the banalities
of this world, her sightless pupils seeing only
the unbroken grain inside the stone,
as she sculpts darkness into daylight,
shaping the sharp edge of shadows too apparent
to notice, clear of vision, deft of hand,
while I trace artful illusions on a surface of sand.
There are times I have tried to follow her in
to the secret place where she sculpts, only to find
she isn’t there – though a haunting humility
enters into me as I stand before her work,
familiar but unfinished. And each time I ask her
to teach me again – how to not look away,
how to re-make myself in her image,
how to stay; how to finally set her free.
Remind me again, blind sculptor,
what it’s like to really see.
James Lilliefors is a poet, and journalist, originally from the Washington, D.C. area, whose writing has appeared in West Trade Review, Ploughshares, The Plentitudes, Third Wednesday, Crow & Cross Keys, The Miami Herald, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook Sudden Shadows was published in 2025, and his poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Amethyst Review 