Stones

I’ve been thinking about stacking. Rocks.

How if you stack small ones on top of slightly larger ones for a week, or month, you’ll end up with a Westchester County wall, and someday Robert Frost will notice it and be inspired to write a poem about how it keeps people out. And in.

Or if you stack six or seven to make a stout tower somewhere in the desert, you would have built a marker that may go untouched for centuries before some one travelling by might think that this spot is marked for a special cause. Lost.

And I question how many bricks did it take to stack enough to build Petra, that stood admired until Arrogance blew it to smithereens, creating a pile of pea gravel stacked upon pavers, upon boulders, and will someone in a thousand years know that what they see as Petra’s beauty is just. A blemish.

And I think of faces, grotesquely sunken from retching disease and the weight of a layer of hastily, but carefully placed stones, and how a shallow, body-length pile of rocks is the only indication of what was once a life so precious. Stones.