The Stoneflower
It leans, a solitary hue
upon the austere granite,
Neither sown
nor awaiting favour’s grace,
Yet dares the sun
with steadfast, quiet fortitude,
Its petals murmur softly,
without entreaty or trace.
I crouch;
my fingers graze the stone’s cold skin
And sense a tremour, subtle, scarcely known;
A heartbeat threads the rock’s unyielding din,
Its pulse, clandestine,
wrought in the marrow of living stone.
The air tastes of dust
and nectar, tempered, rare;
A tang of memory, faint
and curiously sweet;
I inhale,
my own hands pressed to the enduring earth,
Aligning with warmth the stone has borne
through centuries of sun and heat.
A bee veers past,
its flight an off-kilter ballet,
Its solemn humour
provoking a quiet grin;
The hum unravels silence,
subtle, precise,
And in that interstice,
the world contracts, expands, and thins.
Sunlight slides across petals,
like a sidelong glance,
Not pleading,
merely acknowledging what is shown;
Roots insinuate themselves
through fissures with languid perseverance,
A covenant of patience,
wrought without audience or applause.
Its scent, neither flower nor mineral,
insists upon endurance, unobserved;
It bends to nothing,
yet its insistence resonates,
Leaving me implicated,
unreserved, unredeemed.
I rise,
hands lingering on the warming stone,
The quiver of petals,
small, intimate, insistent;
Existence, fleeting,
absurd yet incandescent,
A bee forgets its song,
and I hesitate, quietly,
holding the impossibility in my chest.
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