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| on the beach at Cleggan, Connemara, Ireland ©A. Rutherford |
All my life I have had an inexplicable affinity for stones, some sort of visceral response to rocky places, whether mountain side or shore line. Craggy cliffs both enchant me and provoke me to deep thought. As I am a very tactile person, I enjoy their texture and temperature under my hands, and am often prompted to touch them or move my hands across their surfaces.
I think there is something of Eternity in stones.
Beach Boulders at Cleggan
Do they protect the land or hedge the sea,
These ancient rocks that lie along the shore?
Tumbled there through Time, what might be
The mystery they invite me to explore.
Rapport with rocks, such an absurdity,
But something strikes me at my very core,
Some message here for which they hold the key,
So I walk alone amongst them there once more.
Though lying mute through the ages, they speak as silently
As pages filled with words that answer what I quest for.
No, I have no explanation for the stones' connection with me,
But I know there’s something missing they restore.
As Time eddies in and ‘round them, they rest secure,
And bear witness to my heart, it too shall endure.
©A. Rutherford
Of course, at the risk of a very bad pun, Ireland is a "field day" for people who are enamoured of stones . . . stone cottages, stone walls, stone ruins of abbeys and castles, stony cliffs. So many "rocky places" to explore and experience, from the mystery of the earliest Celtic burial dolmens to the vast vista of the Burren to the cozy cottages nestled under their thatched roofs.
Others have responded to Ireland's stony story as well. John Betjemen, an English poet laureate, describes the stark landscape so well in the second half of his poem "Ireland with Emily."
Stony seaboard, far and foreign,
Stony hills poured over space,
Stony outcrop of the Burren,
Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted,
Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,
. . .
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| Click photo to enlarge |
Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,
A ruined abbey, chancel only,
Lichen-crusted, time-befriended,
Soared the arches, splayed and splendid,
Romanesque against the sky.
. . .
Sings its own seablown Te Deum,*
In and out the slipping slates
Todd Davis is a well-received Mennonite poet who teaches creative writing and environmental studies at Penn State Altoona. His poetry emphasizes the importance of place.
Here are some of his thoughts on making poetry out of stones:
“One of my earliest memories takes place in Connecticut at my maternal grandparents' home. I'm playing on an old stone wall that borders their backyard. A row of cedar trees grows across the way. The green seems almost unbearable when I remember it today: both of my grandparents dead, my own parents growing older. I spy a rose-colored piece of granite three stones from the top of the wall. At this age, I don't understand the way rock latches to rock, holding back the weight of the sky. I slowly wrestle this hard rose from the gray thorns that surround it. Several large stones crash down when I finally pull my prize free, and my index finger is crushed, leaving an indelible impression about the price of beauty.
Wrestling with words is an equally dangerous act as removing a stone from a wall. Each word precariously balances upon the other, and like a stone wall, the words take on another life when placed together, standing for something that they could not stand for alone.”
But he goes on to say:
“As most writers will confess, however, I am more than willing to risk the pain in building poems because of my desire to touch others with what I have seen.”
He speaks of the light that he received from other poets he read and studied:
"whose work spilled out before me like light shining through the canopy of leaves in a maple. With the help of this light, I began to select stones from my own life, carefully brushing away the mud so I might see all of the blemishes and imperfections that make such stones unique and worthy of telling. Soon poems began to appear, their structures unfolding out of the natural world where they were born.
Of course, there are still many days when I cannot find the light. I am part of the earth, and the rhythms of sky offer days of cloud, as well as days when sun and moon hang together into late morning. On gray mornings, I try to remind myself of the blessing found in all days - the kind of light that sifts slowly down through cloud and fog - and then begin my work with words. Some mornings this means waiting in silence, but more often I find in the silence some memory breaking in like a fallen branch snapped underfoot, white bottom of a doe flashing back into the undergrowth."
To read the essay from which these excerpts are quoted, go to
Nota Bene: One reviewer said of Todd Davis:
“I love the integrity, sincerity, and wisdom of Todd Davis’s poems. He is unafraid to write out of a deep faith—both religious faith and faith in the natural world. In a poetic landscape that often seems biased toward the cynical and clever, Davis’s poems unapologetically strive for the mountaintop. They make clear that the natural world still has a few things to teach us, or remind us of things we once knew but have forgotten. They sing with imagistic intensity, and their hard-hitting rhythms accentuate the world’s natural pulse. The restraint and humility of these poems belies their underlying passion and commitment. They are pure and sharp, so sharp they cut.
-Jim Daniels, author of Show and Tell,
Winner of the Brittingham Prize
*Te Deum -The Te Deum is an early Christian hymn of praise. The title is taken its opening Latin words, rendered literally as "Thee, O God, we praise." The text has been set to music by many composers, among them Haydn, Mozart, Verdi, Dvorak, Britten, and John Rutter.
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