Out of the Ashes by John RC Potter

A moment in time and a brief memory,
whispered words softly spoken in a darkened room.
The dust rising in a cloud in some distant desert,
sunlight shining through the ashes of all our yesterdays. 

We live many lives wearing many masks,
we love too much and too often or not enough or not at all. 
We spend our lives fearing death,
while we let love die before our eyes. 

Our bones will one day be but dust
as we find our last resting place;
or our bodies will become mere ashes
in the final fire of our lives.  
Death is not always at the end
and it is not always an ending:
through love we sometimes die a deeper death
than that which eternal sleep can bring. 

I have walked in the dust of yesterday
and left footprints the wind won’t touch;
I have risen from the ashes of love gone bad
and found peace flying above and beyond. 
          I have seen the Phoenix and will follow its flight:
          rising out of the ashes, flying through the dust. 


John RC Potter is an international educator (currently university counsellor, previously principal & teacher) and gay man from Canada, living in Istanbul.  He has experienced a revolution (Indonesia), air strikes (Israel), earthquakes (Turkey), boredom (UAE), and blinding snow blizzards (Canada), the last being the subject of his story, “Snowbound in the House of God” (Memoirist, May 2023). His poems and stories have been published in a range of magazines and journals, most recently in Blank Spaces, (“In Search of Alice Munro”, June 2023),  Literary Yard (“She Got What She Deserved”, June 2023) & Freedom Fiction (“The Mystery of the Dead-as-a-Doornail Author”, July 2023). It was recently announced that "She Got What She Deserved" has been named as one of the Top 100 Projects in the 7th Annual Launch Pad Prose Competition. Learn more at author-blog.org and https://twitter.com/JohnRCPotter.