WHAT WAS THE LAND BEFORE IT WAS LANDSCAPE?
All those years, before I became lost, I lived a different life.
I am like the stones people place on graves to make them a little heavier.
Some bring boxes of burning words grown from roots.
Each attempts to read what the other has scripted.
The rocks here are volcanic. They rise from the sea.
They give a light unequal to the light that's cast on them.
I've seen how the sky becomes the echo of what's flown through it.
Not that it's easy to keep certain moments.
What makes me break this silence and speak to you this way?
Graveyards have things to say, and say them gently.
There's nothing so wonderful as to be heard to the very end.
By Ruth Roach Pierson, from Untranslatable Thought (Anstruther Press, 2016)