Stones: A Prose Poem

The lake is misty stormy today, the colour of chilled green glass, each wave dashing itself on the rocks, bosom first. Under my feet thousands of stones slept to the sound of the pounding surf. I am amazed that I’ve lived this long without realizing that there are no two stones alike. And as much as I wanted to stand and gawk at the watery drama breaking in front me – such noise! so much power! – I could not tear my eyes from the hills and valleys of stones around me, the colours, the shapes, striated, speckled, smooth ones, rough ones, sparkly ones, muted ones, they must be offerings made by the water to the earth, millennia upon millennia, until they finally turned into sand.

Suddenly I come upon a half circle that someone had made from stone, a low wall 2-stone high hidden behind a clump of bush but facing the water, and several stones within the half circle that looked as if they were chosen with special care, each one distinctly different to the rest. I realized then that this is an altar, and time fell away for the moment that I stood there, for I know that we have been making stone altars for as long as we have been on this planet, that whenever we see stones, we are compelled, even the smallest of children, as if by the redness of our blood to erect an altar, a cairn, a monument, a temple, a sacred circle, and in these heaps of stones piled by human hands and human hearts, we answer the call of the mighty surf that said, “I am here, where you come from”; to which we reply, through this geometry of stones, “We are yours, we belong to you.” And we are comforted, small and evanescent as we are, that we are never alone, never far from home.

This, is the covenant that we memorialize, each time we make a stone offering.

As I crested another small hill of the stony beach I see another testament of our connection to the gods, this one circles within circles of stones in the sand, as open as the last one was clandestine, and I smiled to this deep remembrance we have in stones. I remember now too, the dream I had this morning of descending huge stone steps, and it breaks me wide open to know, that the steps I am taking are ancient ones.