! ! What The Stone Said Poem by Michael Shepherd

This stone: scraps of wet earth
still clinging to it;

rounded, greyish; large enough
to fit into my palm as if,

cradled there, it’s enough part of me
to tell me that it’s more than
inert matter without consciousness..

its pleasing roundness – warming
in my hand – tells me a little
of its history:

once it was one of many, jostled
over years or centuries in
a river or an ocean bed;

to be thrown up, again and again,
from the maw of breaking, angry wave
onto a beach; then at some high tide,
pulled back again;

it’s covered with its history:
a mass of scratches where a fiercer sand
from the hierarchy of stone’s hardnesses,
scratched it; to be soothed and smoothed
by its fellow sufferers on the watered bed.

Warm in my cradling palm, it shares
or so it seems, my own consciousness:
the same consciousness as all Creation’s wonders,
but here in supreme, uncomplaining,
inexpressive, yielding pure obedience:
a sermon in a stone; awaiting future call
to be raised up a man..

no wonder - as all children know –
‘beach’ (and can’t you hear there,
tread of feet on hard, resistant, partially
yielding stones?)

and ‘shore’ (and can’t you hear there
the waves smoothe the sand,
then draw back to crash again
like a drawn breath of astonishment?

- as children know: beach and shore
full of their shared consciousness;
God’s playground which he shares with them.

That was what the stone said.