The Paddock Review

The Worrying Stone

 

The sun was low on the horizon and 

the tide was out when I went looking

for a poem. There were beach stones, 

one gray with white rivulets like rivers 

on the moon that I worried as I walked 

the sand into the fading light. A salt-soaked 

gull swung low, swept back and down, 

hopped along, dappled, dancing in the grating 

roar, waves like thunder and foam, and, further out,

a seal rolled, a shadow now in the fog of

dusk. I walked until the moon rose, worrying

that stone, reading its lines with my thumb,

feeling rhythm, the beat of words beyond 

words, the rough poetry of things.

 

This poem is from the chapbook The Worrying Stone: Poems by Benjamin D. Carson (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-worrying-stone-poems-by-benjamin-d-carson/

Elegiac in tone, The Worrying Stone speaks to the vicissitudes of love and loss, of death and dying, and the wages of regret. Relationships fray. Individuals struggle at the edge of sanity. An old man waits to die, while another comes to terms with a youthful impulse to kill. Lives are often rent by violence and shaped by grief. In simple, plain-spoken language, these poems aim at the concreteness of objects, of circumstance, and illuminate the beauty in what Carson calls “the rough poetry of things.”