The Unfinished Pebble (A Speculation)
(To be read slowly and deliberately, keeping the rhythm in check.)
The stone of my story had its beginning
when silence was new: only nothing had being,
and matter lacked form and mystery lacked meaning,
and time was a prelude and place was not finite;
when out of the void came a voice, and a fiat
ignited the first prehistorical twilight.
All through the web of creation impending,
ineffable forces invaded, expanding,
flowing and flooding, pervading, possessing,
cosmic and chemical, re-coalescing,
fusing and forging, forming, reacting,
moving and moulding, cooling, contracting
darker and denser in spheric suspense,
a silently circling elliptical dance
of ordered, of orbital multitudes
of worlds turning tensely in solitude.
And one such becoming, emerging, congealing,
its earliest igneous features annealing,
spilt fire from its core, built crowding and glowering
summits immensely and crazily towering
high over aeons of veiled desolation
till, prey to primevally slow consummation
of elements' endlessly weathering mission,
to merciless weakening, fracture and friction,
foundations at last defaulted and crumbled,
and Atlas disastrously staggered and stumbled.
From craggiest steepness, from one stricken fastness
splitting and slipping in titanic vastness,
a landscape tore free from its jagged horizon,
felt its own weight, and slowly went sliding
with thunderous, ruinous, lingering roar
down to the moiling and seething sea floor.
The ferment that fell from those mountainous shoulders
spewed splinters of megalith, buried great boulders,
strewed rubbles of quartzite that ceaseless erosion
in stippled abysses of cell-brewing ocean
reduced to irregular pebbled compactness
and ground with a grainy minute inexactness.
Until, after moulding by tides in their millions
and jostling and jarring to silicate brilliance,
abraded and burnished but still incomplete,
lies here, on the sand, moon-white at my feet
a story in stone from the book of creation.
Fingers enfold it with mute admiration:
on this shore at this moment I hold in my hand
the willed, the world, a work without end.
Martin Briggs only began writing in earnest after retiring from a career in public administration, since when his work has appeared in various periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. He lives in Suffolk, England.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 