Poem #11 for Poetry Month -- "Stone"

[nightdog_barks]

The last poem of the week is from the Yugoslavian-American writer Charles Simic, and is about the light of the inner life.



Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill --
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.


~ Charles Simic
From What the Grass Says, Harcourt, Inc., 1967
Online source here.

Comments

[takes_a_fairy]

I started to make a lame joke involving the poet and wanting to be stoned, but thought better of it. :)

I like what's written (so far)* and the concept of writing about being a stone , but I wish the writer had delved into it further. It comes across like, "Oh, well, I can't think of anything else to say about being a stone so I'll end it here, leaving me hanging for the rest of the story.
Am I the only one who feels the ending is unfinished* or abrupt?

[damigella]

Yugoslavia reminds of the past. Of the time before a beautiful country, were different languages and religions coexisted peacefully, was torn apart by civil war.
Who knows whether the stones, untouchable by grief and destruction, aren't the ones that fared better in the difficult times that are past.

I have many friends who were born in Yugoslavia; now they're Slovenian, and Croatian, and Serbians, and Bosnian. And they joke together in their language(s) i can't understand, and in their eyes is a longing for the past.

A great poem, but what mostly moved me was the adjective Yugoslavian. I'm weird like that.

[taiga13]

I read this book once where a character was from Yugoslavia and he referred to it as a country perpetually caught in the wrong century. "Whenever I drink brandy I taste blood and seawater."

[silverjackal]

I really like this. The imagery of the outside (and the hidden, complex inside) of the stone is remarkable. At first, too, I would have taken the author for a Sufi.