Stones So Quiet
by Odin Roark

The confinement nothing wishes to escape.

Such might be the life
inside a stone.

For where can ancestral honesty
be better gleaned
than from ocean’s silt
and glacial drift,
this mix of evolution’s
fire and plant,
flesh and bone,
this alchemy,
once magic,
now the stone.

Polished over time,
it rolls,
abuts winds,
sinks slowly
from sea upon sea,
carrying further
this history of life’s time
tumbled from nature’s infant hand
to yet the next
ebb and tide,
shore to shore.

How intimate it must be,
these inner walls of the stone
where once cold of ice
relinquished its drifting sand
beneath maplandia’s anvil,
lending sparks of light within,
impregnating hieroglyphs of personal history,
traveling solo,
traveling lonely,
traveling as a whisper,
these stones so quiet.