Blood from Stone
Stones and bones hide memories: July’s Prose Poem Prompt
Stalwart we stand, keeping watch over this ancient land. For millennia, we have endured — our forms, shaped and shifted by wind and water — or by the earth’s deeper chaos. We are the weary witnesses to time’s incessant passing.
Our lives are hewn out of these rocks. Hewn into these rocks. We cling to them like oysters. Our forefathers and mothers — horded into the bellies of lurching ships, sailed across treacherous seas to this place. Deposited onto these shores, like flotsam and jetsam — we carved our streets, steps, hearths to warm our hands by — from barren rock.
Daughter of a quarryman — yet I was not born on solid ground. I walk — like I’m treading water — like I could slip down — slip away.
Like oysters, we’re a tenacious creed. Chiselling this town out of stone — this strange and foreign continent — where we’re tipped upside down like the bottles of rum we seek solace from — yet preferable to hanging in our homeland — death sentences narrowly escaped for crimes petty, monstrous and ill-blamed. The sweat and blood of us all has mingled; the petty with the monstrous, the monstrous with the ill-blamed. Mingled together on these rocks, as we hammered and pick-axed and blasted our way to a new life.
