Four Thousand Colors

Heat and fire and silica, soda and lime
Combine like alchemy in Waldsassen.
They color with the sun here in Bavaria.

Decades of practiced hands and mouths
Turn molten glass into sheets of beauty.
Four thousand colors are born in their furnace.

Across day and night the kilns are tended,
Loaded and churned until the blend is achieved.
Everyone has their duty in this peculiar art.

Twirling out melt on hollow rods, they sling them
To others who blow out sheer cylinders of grace.
Industrial ballet in gauntlets and boots.

Each piece is a human project in glass
The extension of sweat, intention, skill and more sweat.
Unreproducible, irreplaceable, unique.

They color with the sun at Lambert's.

http://www.lamberts.de/impressionen.html