I hear this clarion music…

Stone things

The stony silence in the great field

is a song whose words I do not hear,

yet it beckons…

The stones have no voice

but their music rises from the resonant earth,

a mix of ancient chords,

the glacier’s pulse for tempo.

The dull and dirty stones sing and sing,

their harmony in millennial measure,

their harmony in lasting sameness,

each with each,

and in their nature, enduring without change,

without distinct past and future,

with truth only in the moment,

perforce, with almost perfect resistance to change

in lieu of elegant quickening spirit.

The stones experience only place as variety,

they are stone-like in whatever aspect,

whatever space…

Their singing is a song of self, of steadfastness,

of strongest will to be.

The stones do stone things wherever they may lie,

in sheltering earth,

or cast aside from a garden,

in cairn, in wall—

the stones ever cling to their stony ways.

So. This is for learning.

I heed this clarion music of the stones,

and I will welcome each new place

and learn to be me there.

June 3, 2016

My poem “Stone things” was published in my first chapbook, Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups. You can buy it on Amazon (paperback and Kindle), or get it free in Kindle Unlimited, search for “Richard Carl Subber”

Published November 18, 2016, in The Australia Times Poetry

I step right into the breach here. I suppose stones have distinct personae, each one unique, durable, resisting almost every change except a change of place—and that’s good guidance for all of us, most days…Cleave to your loves and your plans and your special pleasures and your sense of the right things, but don’t miss an opportunity to go to a new place and find out how you can be you there.

My nature poem “Stone things” was inspired by “The Stones” by Wendell Berry.

I have discovered the poetry of Wendell Berry. If you like your poetry straight from the shoulder, wholesomely explicit, tapped into a love affair with nature, and expressly literate, then get one of his books and take a look.

Here’s a taste:

“I owned a slope full of stones.

Like buried pianos they lay in the ground…

an old music mute in them…

I broke them…and lifted them in pieces.

As I piled them in the light

I began their music…

The stones have given me music…

They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground…”

From “The Stones” in New Collected Poems by Wendell Berry

* * * * * *

A Farewell to Arms (book review)

classic Ernest Hemingway

with relentlessly realistic dialogue…

click here

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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”