Tuesday, April 12, 2022

The stones will cry out

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

 

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