Bone Turned Stone

There is nothing forgiving here
but stones and wind,
and they have no prayers;
just the bleak truth of emptiness
and a great void.

People bypass this strange mass
of stone, unknowing of its past,
when oceans massed the great heights,
and sands beached the whales dark plight;
for this is the place of the nameless dead,
mighty sea-wanderers who long fled
below these dark skies, now exposed
on this bright peak like white bleeders
on the run, their white-capped runners
spewing foam.

This is no children’s tale, no human gazed
upon this marred gnarl of twisted pain:
formlessness displayed, and living flesh calcified.
Time, the giver and taker who never blinks,
always sees fraught this bare scene in dark days.
I’d come here with a friend, unbelieving
in such things, till gaze shot home —
bones turned stone in these snarled-toothed ghosts.

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2019 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.