—"The rock cannot be broken. It is the truth"
(Wallace Stevens, "Credences of Summer")
What shall we say of the rock? That it is there.
That it remains, it is not easily moved.
Its mass, more dense than ours, seems to possess
A will to stasis. It seems more permanent
Than we. Yet these are merely seemings.
Its life — if it has a life — unwinds at a pace
Far more deliberate than our frantic rush
And yet, like ours, it passes. It was born
In fire or under pressure. It ensures
Thousands or millions of years, so that for us
The rock becomes a trope of the eternal.
But that is a mistake. The rock is born,
It lives its life, it dies — that is to say,
It loses bodily integrity just as we do:
Cohesion gone, its end is sand or silt.
Only the spans of time are disparate.
So in the end we and the rock are brothers
Caught in the toils of life that leads to death.
Does the rock, too, as we do, seek for meaning?
We say that love is all, because for us
Love is the primary mover of the soul,
Be it love of self, of other, or of god.
Love gives our life its meaning. So we ask:
What does the rock love? This: it loves the earth.
It longs for earth incessantly, it clings,
Forever yearning, it lies heavily
Upon earth's bosom. In its very body
It holds a heaviness, bringing it always back
To rest there. Indeed, the body of the rock
Is scarce to be distinguished from the earth.
Rock and the earth comprise one lithic substance,
Inseparable, conjoined in primordial love.
The rock's pure love is faithful to the earth
Without condition or degree or end.
How unlike that of the rock is human love!
We do not love the earth, we shun its touch;
We seek the air, contrive to fly, we touch
Earth's surface grudgingly with heel and toe,
We put on shoes, aloft we make our bed,
In cities, hundreds of feet above the ground.
Unfaithful are we, too, to our chosen loves,
It matters not to god or self or others.
Ever inconstant, all our stock in trade
Is, endlessly, betrayal. We say "love,"
But what we mean, invariably, is greed,
Covetousness of possession; yet what we have
We really neither value nor respect.
Should we then even speak of love? For ours
Seems but a momentary idle thing
When judged against the steadfast love of rock.
Can we, then, know the rock at all? Our lives
So short, our love so weak and idle...
What are we doing here upon this earth,
Among these trees, these rivers, rocks and mountains
The trees that grow all round us and the grass,
The rain that falls in torrents on the highlands,
The rivers flowing freely to the ocean,
The mountains thrusting upward to the sky,
The boulders lying close upon the soil —
These remain silent, do not speak to us
In any language we can understand.
They bear a message we know not whereof.
Before we came, gigantic saurian reptiles
Lives in this land and occupied these hills
More fully and for far more time than we.
They made loud noises, wallowed in the mud,
Ate one another, laid eggs and bred their kind.
They are gone now, their bones folded in stone,
Despite their fearsome jaws and armored hides,
Wiped out in some forgotten cataclysm.
They did scant harm and were of no concern
To earth or to the rocks they lived among.
We occupy that space now, with this difference:
That soft and weak and puny though we are,
We lay the earth to waste as they did never.
We plough the earth, quarry and mine the rock,
We dam the rivers, cover the good soil
With concrete parking lots and superhighways,
Clear-cut or burn the forests treeline to tropics,
By force with vast machinery we steal
Petroleum and minerals out of earth's depths.
Wherever we wander, havoc follows after.
We are the plague that dwarfs the dinosaurs,
Making them seem like model citizens.
What shall we say of the rock? That it endures.
It suffers all. Stubbornly it remains
Locked in the earth's embrace, silently insistent
Without remonstrance or complaint, come what may.
If indeed it loves, it is love's prisoner —
This we utterly fail to comprehend.
Our sole response, resentment and disrespect.
The rock's steadfastness shames us. It annoys.
These rocks are always getting in our way!
Time to break out the dynamite... So, say
That though we may be brothers on the earth
We find ourselves permanently at odds with rocks
And thus we miss them, never to realise
That to become more like rocks might save us yet.
The rock remains. The dinosaurs have gone;
They are extinct. When humankind has gone,
The tribe of rocks will still be going strong.
It will endure as long as earth endures,
For earth and rock are one. The earth, perhaps,
May one day be destroyed, in the depths of time,
In some inconceivable cosmic cataclysm.
When that time comes, earth and the rock together
Will perish in one last lingering embrace,
Faithful each to the other unto death.
Let us celebrate the steadfastness of the rock.
— J. Jeffrey Bragg (4-6 March 2020)—oOo—