The Old Quarry Poem by Caroline Misner

They have made a mockery of this,
building these boardwalks of old weathered planks
so that our soles may never touch
the shiftless silt that once resided here.
The splinters protest our approach,
they heave and groan beneath each footfall;

they seem to call—
don’t step here, step instead upon
the hammered stone, the ground,
the dust that crackles underfoot; climb
these boulders that erode their layers
like the skin of the snakes that
lay hidden here.

The walls are not the canyons I recall,
nor the ravines that meandered
between these humps of stone,
dwarfing the foliage that split
the abandoned granite blocks;
they now inhabit these ancient bones,
so proud of themselves, though
they have accomplished nothing.

The grandeur of this place has been sanded down,
a colossus dulled and drab,
even in midsummer when all the hues
spiraled in shadowed kaleidoscope
when I lay down upon this ragged slab
like a human sacrifice
and turned my face up toward the sun.

Even the trees that crest the rim where the sky
and quarry meet, have brandished their age,
bristling above this ragged crater,
now filled with moss and swaying reeds.
Blooms of amber, white and fuchsia splay
like mist below the rust tipped stalks,
casting whispers in the air—
water has turned the ground to marsh,
the boardwalk a sheath of wood,
neither a martyr nor a saint.