[132 words]
I
Shift the stone with both hands. Block the sun’s glare from blinding or burning them. Don’t touch. Keep your breath from their bodies. Don’t wake them. Hunch beside their earth chamber. A stone’s width away. Take a deep breath. Don’t touch. Speak to them as moon dust speaks to distant wind. Don’t trouble them with mystic questions. Leave them to their secrets.
II
Offer silent incantations: health, prosperity, fertility, love. See them sprawl and receive. Don’t touch. Know their mighty vibrations as the sleeping cat knows its grasshopper hangs from a frond of bitter panic. As it knows its lungs pump inside its ribcage to send out slumbering purrs across a bending field.
III
Don’t touch. Gently now replace the stone. Use both hands. Don’t crush them or mangle their prophetic universe. Rise and leave them. Don’t look back. Go about your hours. Never return to shift the stone. Just pray and pray and pray you haven’t crushed them.
Stephanie Jones is a writer with bylines in The New York Times, DownBeat, NPR: Music, The Detroit Free Press & elsewhere. Her poems appear/are forthcoming in Four Tulips, New Reader Magazine, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Sublimation, Orchards Poetry Journal, New Feathers Anthology, Eye to the Telescope & elsewhere, and as a commission for Blue Note Records.
