if I fall and scrap my knee, I give my blood to the unforgiving earth, and though she doesn't soften, I feel a momentary hardening in myself, a sense of the stone that holds me up
there was a time when even mountains were young and soft and warm, still molten or raw in the air. there was fire in the void, unlimited by oxygen, and there was ice without ocean. she came between them, new and sharp, giving as she took what was hers, meeting the water and letting him shape her, and she him
she remembers when the ice scraped her bare, when the humans first built grass huts and cut stone tombs into the hills, was already old when the gods fought for land. she learned to wear their forms and reach out to the humans but they sensed the height and the depth that echoed in her words and images
her stone is still her, still hers, through glacier and flood, invasion and tourism, and she cannot be chased away. what's her is hers. and the blood soaks into the stone, and the feeling recedes leaving a very large rock and a very small person
for Naomi