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Stone Speech
Crowding this beach
are milkstones, white
teardrops; flints
edged out of flinthood
into smoothness chafe
against grainy ovals,
pitted pieces, nosestones,
stoppers and saddles;
veins of orange
inlay black beads:
chalk-swaddled babyshapes,
tiny fists, facestones
and facestone's brother
skullstone, roundheads
pierced by a single eye,
purple finds, all
rubbing shoulders:
a mob of grindings,
groundlings, scatterings
from a million necklaces
mined under sea-hills, the pebbles
are as various as the people.
Charles Tomlinson
Poetry brings together, connects. Here, Tomlinson uses words that describe humans to describe stones. Noses, faces, skulls, babies, brothers, shoulders, eyes, heads, fists. It makes me wonder - does this show that humans are like stones, or that stones are like humans? Or is it that there is an underlying truth tying both stones and humans together? And if this is "stone speech", what are the stones saying?
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