Here, the Rocks are Alive
Southern France
The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.
-Native American writer, Scot Momaday
Ripe in your caverns, cool and damp the milk of the ewe threaded with fungus,
where stonewalls crumble, mottled with moss, blue green the veins,
the mold in aging Roquefort, a delicacy
pungent with raw life, inside the depths of you.
The scalloped lines of coquilles du St. Jacques buried in your soul,
and spiraled beginnings of life’s pilgrimage pressed into your bones.
Here the rocks are alive, where swallows flit out of the crack in barn walls,
walls built of stone, two hundred, six hundred, nine hundred years past.
From inside the wall of a village church insistent peep of hatchlings echo from your rock
and the cat sits, tail twitching and the parents scold in sharp flight
disappear with a worm wiggled into the dark space between the stones.
Here the rocks are alive with stories of prehistory etched in your bowels
horse and bison, mammoth, woman, spirit, death.
A hand stenciled deep inside where stalagmites, pearl white
stretch up into the drip, drip, drip of water.
A hand, five fingers and a palm mirror of my own
stenciled with charcoal spewed through hollow bone by the breath of the first man
deep in the earth, deep the connection.
I would place my hand on cave wall feel the cold, fill the space
The space, a hand reaching through the ages; grand, mysterious legacy.