Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, QUARRIED STONE, by ALICE MONKS MEARS


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

QUARRIED STONE, by                    
First Line: He who lay on rock
Last Line: The sun on quarried stone.
Subject(s): Abandonment; Family Life; Sleep; Desertion; Relatives


He who lay on rock,
who struck from rock his fire,
who felt his bare foot light and lock
on steep gray ledges, there to mock
the cats that stalked no higher;
who smelled the winter air
strong with padded foe
and set with frosted hands his snare,
then laughed to find the wild thing there
snarling in the snow;
who saw the forest leap
to flame and felt the foam
of warm white wood-ash piling deep,
and woke his children from their sleep
to find another home;—

He no longer knows
the earth-roots where he fed,
the leaf-layered slopes, warm rock he chose.
His body could feel no repose
where once he made his bed.
He marks no smell or sound
of preying things abroad.
He does not see upon the ground
the scrawling tracks they left around,
the silk-lined bark they clawed.

He never turns at night
for wind, an ancient dread,
but takes his feast in snug delight
where fire, the slave, bends low his bright
and scarlet-turbaned head.

Yet now the subtle mind
creates within its walls
new enemies, a noiseless kind;
they wander bodiless, confined;
they shadow thought's long halls.
Until man desperate weep,
cursing the beasts, and kneel
and whine again for life — then creep
into the dark, lain down to sleep
with slender-bodied steel.

Deserted cliffs now lock
the ancient sterner bone
of half-man too strong for man to mock.
And the rain beats down on blasted rock,
the sun on quarried stone.





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