Stones

I bring them from the mountains,
from the sea, from the edge
of streams and look at them,
heft them, hold them hard
while they keep holding themselves
harder. Is it because
they haven’t had to change
their surfaces in our time
though, in theirs, they’ve suffered
the blunt demands of ice
and water and wind and god
knows fire, been cracked and frozen,
thawed, made molten again
and again have started over
grinding and being ground
from monument to boulder,
to rock, to river stone,
to gravel, to pebbles, to sand,
to slurries of grit, to dust?