Rock of Ages

ancient rock in my back yard

Silent she greets me every

morning as I open up the house;

collects my smiles, hears my sighs;

my rock of ages—past and yet to come.

*

Silent she listened once to autumn sighs of

Lenape maid who watched her warrior man

dance and whoop in my back yard, then

fade into the forest trees to fight the strangers

threatening to change the only world she knew.

Listened again as Lenape lament turned into summer

songs of Dutch haus-frau beating her rugs on

clothes-lines strung between my ancient oaks. 

Later heard the wintry roar of guns as

tattered soldiers tramped across this ground,

weary, cold, but ever hopeful that their revolutionary

hopes would usher in a spring of independence peace. 

*

But long before the Lenape or any other humans made their

mark upon this land, my rock had rested eons in her

spot, remembering her journey from those distant rocky

tors, the ache of glacial ice that scraped and pushed and

prodded her through ages and ages of time, until a warming earth

took off her frozen coat, and left my rock alone,

abandoned here; her sisters, cousins scattered far and wide.

*

Perhaps her scrabbled trek from home so far away;

perhaps her lonely vigil through time beyond

imagining; perhaps her silent witness to the

history of this space; perhaps all these have given her the

graces that she gives to me each day,

sitting there beneath my bordering trees;

solid, firm, and still—she anchors me in

here and now; reminds me of how tiny is my

life, yet how immensely prized each moment

given me to live and love and hope.