And Because It's Friday...

A favorite around these parts--Carolyn Forche. "The Museum of Stones." I've just started analyzing this, as I read it for the first time while out in Cali last week. Would love to hear what folks think after we digest for a couple hours. Poem is after the jump.

The Museum of Stones

This is your museum of stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,

collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,

battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir,

stones loosened by tanks in the streets

of a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,

schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,

pebble from Apollinaire's oui,

stone of the mind within us

carried from one silence to another,

stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende,

agate, marble, millstones, and ruins of choirs and shipyards,

chalk, marl, and mudstone from temples and tombs,

stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold,

stone from the tunnel lined with bones,

lava of the city's entombment,

chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,

paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,

stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,

those that had flown through windows and weighted petitions,

feldspar, rose quartz, slate, blueschist, gneiss, and chert,

fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe

of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,

stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,

from a chimney where storks cried like human children,

stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,

altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode, and hail,

bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,

stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,

stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin, and root,

concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,

all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk

with hope that this assemblage, taken together, would become

a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred,

like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

 

Comments

Jim October 31, 2008 12:51 PM

A loosely structured meditation on the roles that stones have played in human life, along with almost punning excursions into metaphors using stones ("stone drunk" etc.) Emphasis on the more brutal aspects of history early on, but closes on an ambiguously religious tone with what seems to be a reference to Stonehenge. Good poem.

Ta-Nehisi Coates October 31, 2008 12:53 PM

Gah, was supposed to cut comments off till later. Sorry Jim...