SUO: Re: A Well-Known Rock On Tour

[Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>]

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|
| In Defense of Stones
|
| For instance, take that stone
| by the guard rail over there.  One day
| it will break down into sand, won't it?
| And be mixed with leaves and leached
|
| by water, oh slowly, but for sure?
| Then won't a root suck it up with its long
| flexible straw, powered by the secret
| green lips of the plant?  Won't it suck
|
| with all the fierce joy it can muster?
| And if the plant were a bean, perhaps I eat
| each pod, feeling the rightness of it,
| and one day this whole stone will be inside me
|
| and I speak from prior knowledge
| of generations of stones lodged in my gall
| bladder, the knowledge that I too will be ground
| in the dark gizzard of the world.
|
| I chew this notion over and over, how it happens
| that I could end up food for a rock
| or the rock itself:  rigid and grey
| and alone.  But maybe stones
|
| are just another way of living --
| you could say a different style --
| and if only we knew how to listen
| to such enormous or tiny sounds,
|
| we could hear their low, age-long conversations
| at cliff bottoms or along riverbeds;
| or feel how they embrace life so fiercely
| they batter themselves to bits.
|
| So I wonder, who is the stubborn one here --
| the boulder in the field refusing to budge
| for anyone, or me in the road,
| arguing with myself, refusing to live?
|
| Janet MacFadyen, 'In Defense of Stones',
| Heatherstone Press, Sunderland, MA, 1995
|
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