The Sailing Stones

Rocks here dream of distant hills.

When the world at night turns to sleep
they uncurl and stretch stiff joints,

cracking echoes across the valley.

When rain falling late into the night
floods and flashes ice on the flats,

they rise and conspire together
to leave the valley forever,

to walk among faraway hills,
taste the spray of lonely seas,

plunge into swaying waves --
the salt an unexpected memory,

the descent through fathoms of cold
and dark an unwanted nightmare

with glimpses of an unlit city
ever further below,

its walls and twisted towers
marshaling the black end of night.

They wake on cracked earth
beneath a wide empty sky,

sky enough to swallow oceans whole.

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Originally published by New Plains Review, Fall 2017