shot glass
title
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Dirk James


 

Bone, Rock, Then Ash

Tramping over the bed of a long gone ocean
we hear the echoes of her sad, old sea shanties
swirling in the dusty spindrift, caught up in the slipstream
of time.

We are here to sink wells deep into her steep slopes.
Breaking through that high shale and in to cobbled firmament
of black basalt. Tapping and peering down into the skylight.
We are interlopers

Interrupting a sleeping household! Drilling and drilling finally
we break through and find a nurturing fossil cradling her
dry child. A distrubed relic unfolds her arms slowly, gingerly
like any doting mother

giving up her only son, tangled in her apron strings, giving him up
into the hands of strange suitors. Beneath tons of hot sunlight
a fire opal shines anchored in the forehead of the Sun.
Here, it's always bone, rock, then ash.