STONE

From an old cage, old grave where dew
diminishes the base of a statue, you break out
from the stone again. Inside the hour and a chance
for snow to deepen the air on this day,
you wear the sun’s calm face. Your eyes eat away
the haze where a December sky begins. It never ends
how the future grows gray in the hair,
and the past draws gifts. You linger
and look to a tree Christmas enough to light a god.
Brush away the rubble on your bare feet.
Off your shoulder, rocks fall like bells
swallowed by silence. The day unburies you.
Outside the dark shelter in a yard, the overseer of night
once sized you up—blues from which
your body was made to dwell inside the stone.
Weather its labyrinth of trenches and underpasses.
What bones bent in you turned discolored,
cave-coarse and yoked as a neck
could be beneath stone. So many songs,
caroling outside the door. The tidings
of red poinsettia and music carry the festive
ties up to where full voices mark
your need to empty yourself and be whole:
hand and heart remembered once more
and still here.

Phillip Shabazz is the author of three poetry collections, and a novel in verse. His poetry has been included in the anthologies, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont: A Guidebook, and Home Is Where: African-American Poetry from the Carolinas. Some previous publication credits in journals include, Across the Margin, Fine Lines, Galway Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Ham Lit, Impossible Task, ImpSpired, Obsidian, On The Seawall, and Louisville Review.