Rock Formations Of Life Poem by Vinita Agrawal

Rock Formation of Life

Let me tell you about dust.

The kind that crumbles to your feet straight from the heart
knows no rest...and rises back to the heart again,
not heeding night, day, wind or storm.
Knowing only to settle into the cranium
like proof of a life not lived.

Then, there's the real dust of earth
to which we all belong;
return to its bosom like chipped-stone fetuses.
Sometimes never leaving.
Enduring the cut of rivers, their weight, their flow.
Laying our bodies beneath water like a smooth alluvial bed,
striated with smiles.

Also, the dust of the stars
that gets into the eyes like dreams.
Zooming comet-like in the limbs,
believing that fate can be conquered.
And when it can't, dust dies the way stars do -
falling out of the sky, consumed by a black hole of defeat.
Never rising again.

And then, the dust of you and me
from roads glimpsed in each other's eyes, but never tread.
Dust from the tornados always slashing our horizons.
Waning us. Forcing us to brave them.
Until we became sedimented
somewhere in between the earth's cold mantle and its hot,
heated core.
Compacting pain, lithifying cries. Visible for eons in the rocks of life.
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