Geppetto finds the stone

Even a lonely man who has never married,
whose only fragrant memory ended in Venice,
suffers the need to bury his loved ones.

Geppetto’s sister drowned in her lover’s arms,
and while he held and wept in caricature,
it was Geppetto who dug the grave and buried her bones.

It was while digging, his tears weakening the soil,
letting the spade slide in like a lover, that Geppetto
found the stone; a single stone amidst the grit of earth.

Once a mountain or a comet?
A tear, perhaps,
from a lost Goddess?

Geppetto reached out his hand and lifted free the stone,
defyied gravity,
disregarded the strange stares of his sister’s lover
and her gathered friends.

After he studied the stone for a moment,
While the crowd murmured and fidgeted,
he plopped it into his white shirt pocket;
felt the weight of it match his heart.

He kept the stone as company, through evenings
and days, a marker to his sister’s memory, not knowing
that its proximity to his sadness instigated change.

The stone began to believe it was a seed
and waited with the patience of rock
for the log to give it birth.