Stone Garden

meet pink sunhat

Look, a poem!

Upon A Time On A Hike In A Park Nearby

The path opened upon
a garden of stone and oak
manicured over centuries
by careful creatures passing
through morning mists.

A pink sunhat bobs and hops
among them flailing arms.

It took millennia to form these
giant rocks, ages to shape them
and drop them in this canyon
by the river, lodging them among
these thick trunks, ancient
(by east coast standards).

The pink sunhat flashes
out of sight then emerges,
a minute and a few grunts later,
on the highest point of 
the largest rock.

These boulders are limestone.
The whole canyon is limestone.
Ages ago these mountains were
a shallow sea full of calcium rich
organic things. These rocks used 
to be alive, then they died.
Bones and shells settled on
the floor of the sea,
layers of sedimentary
extracts compressed into stone.

Little hands seek out holds
as sneakered feet shuffle
along the moss slick slope
off the boulder’s back.
“This one looks like Godzilla.”
It does.
“I will call it, ‘Godzilla.’”
And it was so.

The river carved out these stones,
breaking down the years of bio debris
with its swift slide over slicking stone
troughs, pausing around cyclical,
naturally forming pools, flowing over
old dams. Water is one of nature’s
few fast actors.

After wiggling through a tight gap
between two stones, the pink sunhat
surges forward, up the trail,
out of the mystical garden of stone
and oak, and toward the promise
of a mighty waterfall.

In wordy wordiness,

Walter