I can feel your aching in my bones and deep beneath my skin, in the place we all know but cannot name. I see you.
Those with mounting loss that never relents, pieces of you taken slowly over time like a pickax on stone to make a cliff.
Or all at once like a bomb was set inside you long ago and you didn’t know you were out of time.
You can’t run when you’re falling apart, but the the wonder of being in pieces is you cover a lot of ground.
The treasures you’ve found and the things you’ve seen can’t even be described.
But it shows when a seeker finds you gleaming on the earth, collecting gems for friends and kin.
This is how you begin again in another’s hands.
You can’t jump when you are the ledge, and lovers and dreamers stand at your edges.
The beauty of stone is it can hold others up. Who wouldn’t want to do that for love?
You may be worn but you don’t break unless the earth quakes, and even then you start back where you began as grains of sand communing with the sea,
or under children’s feet and stuck between their toes.
Who knows how those seeds will grow when they accidentally bring you home, or you are carried out in the waves to voyage and pave another shore.
Or maybe you make a pearl from the tumult, shining through the violence, bringing light to the ocean floor.
You could be gathered to adorn the door to hidden worlds, feeling the magic flow through you each time a traveler finds the way.
A little of it stays with you every time, which is fine because they are always making more. And you…
You were destined for more than a door. So you let the magic change your form.
What will you be now that you’ve been stone and gem, sand and pearl? Now that you know what all the pressure and pain exposed?
For you were always a jewel of the world.
Copyright © 2021, S. Naify
Creature Speak 