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By sea-shore and all alone
sat I brooding on a stone
Saddened whispered lonely waves
To the rocky shore blown
Thunderous wafted on the sky
Clouds on the wind blown
Heralding tempestuous
Wind was just a rough groan
Far the eye could discern
Murmuring the cyclone
Westward the gusts aroar
Leaves onto land flown
The place as I did sojourn
Eye as if of the cone
Wherefore the gales aim
Right along the peril-zone
Of a sudden waters breathe
Their hearts to dethrone
All the ocean hath inside
To the land o'erblown
Sundry were the wares aloft
been so given on its own
There among the various
Showed along a man's bone
Who, the ill-fated seaman?
Left his family to bemoan
However punctilious
Death does come but unbeknown
Fixed as the north-star
Can not one it postpone
All can try one's best
Goodly deeds so're sown
Any time good to do good
Never late is to atone
So what if my beloved's cruel heart is stone
It stays inside my heart, this stone
Family, friends, faith — falsities all
Everything I lost romancing this stone
Stripped bare, amputated and deafened
My eyes see and my tongue praises only this stone
They say she is dead, a cold corpse now buried
I stole it away from her grave, this stone
Some day, some life, some world, when we meet
I will give back what is hers, this stone
I have been accused of idol-worship these days
They think they know it for what it is, this stone
What sacrilege, sin, schism do they speak about, Falaq
This stone is I, I am this stone . . . .
I watch my children play by the garden sandstone
seeking bliss among blossoms and scraping rough stone
The young immortals play with all sincerity
their blessing will disappear like a water-loved stone.
Even now I try to recall the first embrace
of their warm hands. Memory is a failing shew-stone.
Each line once cast is slowly erased, the decay
defining an image in relief on wearing stone.
Sweeping the world up within his scrying mind
Bu Mahmoud keeps his silence like a brooding stone.
I looked to you for love; your eyes were stone —
so cold, I've carried hurt for years, a stone
that often crushed my happier thoughts of you.
I tried to give you up but felt so alone.
Forgiving you is a daily struggle,
every day pushing off the weight of stone.
Your job was to be loving; you were not.
Not once did I ever hear you atone.
I try not to think of the times you failed,
to think instead of the times you shone —
your smile when you taught me how to swim,
your smile when you shared a fresh-dipped ice cream cone.
I do not want to live beneath a stone.
I wish I could forget your look of stone.
A farmer sowed good seed among the stone
and harvested his crop of rock and stone.
In fall this hilltop's crowned with golden
leaves of oak, but still its spine is stone.
The small boy walks the country road
imagining futures, kicking every stone.
Always waiting for what never comes,
she watched her lifetime turn to stone.
We cleared and shoveled land to build
a house. What do we have? A wall of stone.
What does the earth dream of forever-
after? A glorious combustion of stone.
He set his heart on stardom; mimicked,
posed until his profile changed to stone.
And who am I? A poet walking woods
and stream, musing on each mossy stone.
Some tears alight on the ground as a feather will land on a stone.
I am darkness, a shadow remains where I place my hand on a stone.
Some yield to the tide of their blood, some cling to their place by the fire,
But I have sought out the desert and taken my stand on a stone.
Among the locusts I think of the seas I have crossed; one is much
Like the other, my friends: think how puddles contract and expand on a stone.
You, Ghazala, who drew down the moon for me once, and whose beauty
Befuddled me: I am the outcast it pleased you to strand on a stone.
From my heart's bitter quarry I gouged out a pillar of pride where my wounds
Could be written, as God might inscribe a ferocious command on a stone.
My griefs assembled and swore a blood oath to each other, they gathered
In moonlight and howled, like some ancient, brotherly band, on a stone.
When the lion-faced wind, that teethed on the ridges, scares up the dunes
Into flurries, I crouch in the brunt of it, sprinkling sand on a stone.