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The mind is a sieve, fond memories prone
to flow to deep wells. Regrets stick like stones.
The deepest wells hold waters lit by joy,
remembered light defying walls of stone.
A memory not remembered but recounted:
ancestral markers turned to pavingstones.
And yet, a child finds silver pools and laughs.
Her laughter skips across the pools like stones.
Are joyful memories lost, drowned in whirlpools
formed by trapped regrets? Let me toss the stones.
Her fractured heart had dried to jagged stone.
Yet, crystal facets hide within that stone.
In henges, bluestone and sarsen sentinels watch
over secrets druids scried from circled stone.
Upon seeing her damaged soul through lucid eyes,
Medusa's ghosts reside in hollowed stone.
The stars seduce with siren songs all night.
Still, all of us are tied to this third stone.
Time decays to zero: silent, cold.
The universe abides as hardened stone.
"I do not love you". Each flung word a stone
lapidation, a flinty hail of stone.
Spicy sugar cake and honeyed sweetmeats
stick in my craw, each crumb a jagged stone.
Oh love, the sun danced in your eyes
dazzled, I did not see your gaze was stone.
I will tear my heart out, take it to the well
the petryifying well that turns all things to stone.
Weathered by the wind and drip by steady drip
my heart will grow a shield, a carapace of stone.
Unassailable, repelling all attack
it will resist, my battered heart of stone.
When the full harvest moon shone on me I felt the size of a mountain of stone,
My shadow emerged huge, mysterious and shapely, when I was a stone.
When the crescent moon was shimmering on me I barely sensed I was there,
Dark, smooth, hidden, still new moon and me in silveriness, when I was a stone.
When no beautiful sound could I make, no matter how delicately struck,
I felt my dumbness and dullness, longing not to be silent, when I was a stone.
Little children's feet danced on me when I was stone tiles, I could feel, yes feel!
But alas, I was stone-stuck, unable to move, like their sweet feet, when I was stone.
Once when bright man-made lights shone into me, I replied, gushing blood red
Ruby consciousness. I poured forth in beauty, they gasped, when I was a stone.
Then there I was the hardest and yet loveliest I had been in all my stone states.
Sparkling, refractive, fiery diamond. I was loved, coveted and stolen, when I was a stone.
So many stone stories I can tell as the minds hologram memory portals open.
There is the stone that hit the Perfect Master on his glorious brow, Oh to be that stone.
Now, evolved human, I confabulate these few tales of lonely stone-still times,
Not so unfamiliar seeing a stoniness in my being sometimes, as when I was a stone.
O Raindust, be yourself and sing. Bright heart, movement, feelings, family and friends.
Give calm rest to this ghazal of those millions of lives so long ago when you were a stone.
Imagine the massive forces that created Stone
Mountain, molten mineral churned to stone.
In all the old family photos, your anxious mother,
you with startled eyes, your father sterned to stone.
She waited till he came back home, laid beneath
his country's flag. Her heart turned to stone.
Those young boys who watched their city elders
meting justice, that is how they learned to stone.
The cone erupted, sending blazing rivers down,
covering everything with blackness burned to stone.
In the granite slab, the sculptor saw a maiden
who changed everything he earned to stone.
And I, poet between leaf and river, feel earth
stir beneath me, though it yearned to stone.