Kernsview Park Stones Poem by Caroline Misner

They’ve built a trellis and cut a path
through where the fir trees used to grow.
Spiny thistles burst with age, tall reeds
that have turned to rust and moss
has pillowed the flagstone steps
I used to walk on as a child.

The ruff of grasses offer no opinions,
reclusive crickets slough the air
with grating syllables, a strip
of blue haze, a lake, slips in the fine
foam where water has filled the small
canyons; now the new things grow.

A lone woman in black has come
to endeavour solitude; smoking, her back
to the mottled crags that have anchored
this old escarpment so well, for so long,
chiselled from limestone. She looks
to the superhighway at the foot of the hills.

Traffic thickens at the cusp of a new
country where the cars creep at a snake’s
pace. She and I are sisters to
a slow arc, the beating breaths if the wind,
the ossified rings of rock that have
for years occupied this glory.