International Rock-Flipping Day

To learn more about International Rock Flipping Day, go to Via Negativa or the IRFD Flickr Group.

For years I sat with people as they
turned over boulders in their hearts.
Millipedes, centipedes, scorpions;
snakes and roots and cockroaches.

The occasional treasure: a gold
watch, a glass jewel, a glittery bit
of quartz. Clumps of earth, dry
and grey; or deep and dark

and fertile. Sometimes a stone
shattered, bringing blood
and relief. Sometimes a rock
would find its way up to the throat,

choking, smothering; once even
a killing wound. But often the weighted
souls left my room scattered with
discarded pebbles. They remembered

how heavily their pockets had bulged
with the old, the deliberately
or sadly forgotten. Now and then
some would upturn a stone and find

themselves. Sometimes a buried
root, feeling the air and the light,
might sprout into something new,
living and green. Sometimes

the person would quietly set
the stone back in its place,
leaving it to its own dark
and busy life.