In The Land Of Stones Poem by Simon Gwynn

Sometimes it seems
less sense remains in me
than a jellied eel, or a mute wedged tortoise
scrabbling the mountainous years away
beneath him placidly.
Always rebounding from the headlands of life,
or beating back pebble-eyed hordes,
brought down in slingshot skirmishes
around others magnetic storms.
So I lost the talent to foresee
and circumspect life gracefully.

As a child I was
an eminent navigator,
precocious dream aviator;
but soon my bones filled out that infant flux
to a calcified, raw, abrupt full span.
The irony of weather worsened
and I was forced to make for land.

It proved a strange terrain.
An obtuse, rough-hewn, confounding place
passed on through the hands of everyman,
a bloodless, impenetrable stone.
On this we graze and bruise
and scar ourselves. All days
are endless obstinate obstruction,
lost in memory without trace.
Is it a wonder,
in my last sustaining dream of years, to don
a stoneground carapace?