Stone
Go inside a stone.
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
Charles Simic
Charles Simic is a remarkable poet. He has published over 15 volumes of his own poetry and translated works from French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian authors. Yugoslavian by birth, Simic has been living in the US since the 1950s. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius grant and the Pulitzer Prize.
Seamus Heaney, poet extraordinaire, used these words to describe Simic’s poetry: “Surrealist, and therefore comic, but with a specific gravity in his imagining that manages to avoid the surrealist penalty of weightlessness.”
I have read this poem many times, but it never goes stale.
Wonderful, Deborah – stones are marvellous to contemplate and exercise their strange magic on me also, and always have. I remember discovering quartz pebbles making sparks, and how my sister and I would pretend we were fireflies on summer evenings, striking our pebbles together. I have a strange collection of stones picked up from my various wanderings, and handle them a lot. You know, the habit of Jewish people to put stones on their graves is in many ways a better memorial act than placing flowers, stones persist, as do people in our memories.
I shall go and find some books by Charles Simic for myself.