Stone People
Stone People
On an old world, or under it,
we found them,
or at least I think we did,
he said. Another drink! and I,
eager for the tale, supplied it.
The ruins were so old
even granite statuary
could not be dated,
or yielded nonsense dates
in the billions of years.
We could not read the ancient script,
it may some day be translated,
but we found catacombs
that stretched downward for kilometers
until the heat played tricks with our
eyes, the walls seemed to flow like taffy,
and we could go no further
I call them catacombs,
for though we found no bones,
we found death. Death crept upon us
from the walls, which spoke from tortured faces
that warped and ran across the stone, and I left
five teammates in those airless tunnels
from which we somehow
could not retrieve them...
when we tried to find their bodies
they had moved, or we somehow missed
the tunnels where they had been lost.
It was as if the network of claustrophobic
passageways had not yet decided
on its final form.
Don't ask for more, I don't
have it. I only know I'm through with space.
I asked no questions; I too
have seen or felt
the unspeakable out there
in that universe undreamt-of
that we call our own.
Into the stones we went,
there we found ourselves, crystal people,
deathless trilobite eyes forever hidden
from the violence of our hunger,
and the memory of our flesh,
yet we could not escape our legacy, which had
depopulated the planet and gnawed without cease
at our vitals. When the strangers came we
could not help but
prey for release.
In vain.
the end
106th Weekly Poetry Contest