The Sailing Stones
- Rocks here dream of distant hills.
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- When the world at night turns to sleep
- they uncurl and stretch stiff joints,
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- cracking echoes across the valley.
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- When rain falling late into the night
- floods and flashes ice on the flats,
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- they rise and conspire together
- to leave the valley forever,
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- to walk among faraway hills,
- taste the spray of lonely seas,
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- plunge into swaying waves --
- the salt an unexpected memory,
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- the descent through fathoms of cold
- and dark an unwanted nightmare
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- with glimpses of an unlit city
- ever further below,
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- its walls and twisted towers
- marshaling the black end of night.
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- They wake on cracked earth
- beneath a wide empty sky,
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- sky enough to swallow oceans whole.
— New Plains Review
Fall 2017
