Impressions From a Stone Skipped On Water

He grabbed me up from where I lay, peaceful in the sun, with my brothers and my sisters round about me. I felt four digits seeming to be one of a whole, which clasped around my form. A fifth one, slightly broader, pressed onto me from my other side. And then with a jolt, I found myself next lifted high into air, the dry hot bed beneath me but a whisper of my past. Accustomed, at the most, to being trodden upon, I barely had the time to assimilate this rare experience (I seemed to remember a sweeter touch long ago from a smaller being who had picked me up, examined me and then placed me back on the ground). Suddenly, I was moving, this time unsupported, through the air. I spied in a single spinning moment a world I’d not envisioned from the spot on earth I'd shared with pebble siblings. In that place, we were surrounded by greenery that blocked our view and by giant old gray boulders, my ancestors perhaps. Reposing heavily as if attached to land, one such silent sentry supported him, the creature who had flung me far from my home. I found myself then bump, bump, bumping along, making little rings across a shiny stretch of blue. And when I lost momentum, I disappeared beneath the final circle I’d created. It felt much like the times I had been buried in cold whiteness, but this instead was liquid cool! I dropped down and down, onto a different kind of ground, unusually soft and sticky, the way earth used to feel for me after a sudden downpour. Settled there, I noticed brown and silver shapes that flitted past above me, much smaller than many of the creatures of the land above me, but swifter. Also there were tall green blades that swayed in place. They resembled those that stood on solid ground. Best of all, I saw around me others of my kind; a multitude of us, small, beautiful and round, with whom to share my soft new cozy bed! June 25, 2017 Submitted Aug. 8, 2021 for the Stone Poetry contest of Anthony Biaanco