To each we stone ask: “How-do-you-do?”
And stone answers back: “Well! And you?”²
Not a stone but cries behind us, every weary step,
“Where, Where?” … I leave stones to reply to stones …³
Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide my Self in thee—⁴
Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel—
Nay, more than flint, for Stone at rain Relenteth!⁵
We are forced to appear before a Miner—
And take the form of a Stone.⁶
Every stone one lifts by day—
Becomes one’s Heart by night:⁷
A pulse of stone: Mineral Arteries.⁸
Poetry is a language for the stone
When it sits naked under its own name
And is hurled by the wind over the slope:⁹
Rocks have their Dreams—
And the earth Changes—¹⁰
¹ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
² Langston Hughes, Heaven
³ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
⁴ Wendell Berry, At a Country Funeral
⁵ William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis
⁶ Paulo Coelho tr. Alan R. Clarke, The Alchemist
⁷ Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
⁸ Denise Levertov, Lovers (I)
⁹ Khairi Mansour tr. May Jayyusi & Jeremy Reed, Poetry
¹⁰ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven