A response to Mike and Julie's Forest Church session on "The Stones will cry out". This was written on the slopes of Ashley Walk where the New Forest's sands and gravels preserve the ancient coasts and rivers from a time long gone. Carved into those vast accumulations of sediments from a warmer clime, the long, low valley slopes are remnants from the Tundra cold, the summer melt of permafrost sliding sheets of slushy gravel into seasonal meltwater streams. The stones remember it all.
Stone flowers
In another frame of time
Where centuries are but a blinking of an eye
These landscapes wrinkle, curve
Grow deeper valleys
And more elongated streams.
The stones awake from million-year long sleeps,
They chatter, flow, grow round or shatter with
The energies of water and
The agencies of ice.
Some are buried deep again
Until the epochs change and landscapes rearrange.
Others bleed their substance to the soil and by the toil
Of human hands coax food
from lands.
And we, imbued,
By essence of the stone, grow bone
And feather it with flesh.
The body we conceive as ours
Is but the bud and bloom
Of stone-grown flowers.
Alistair McNaught April 2022
