1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below the poem

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

Charles Simic
https://poets.org/poet/charles-simic

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Note: Next Read Around is:
Oct 29, 2021 at 4:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Many people think stones are stones and nothing more, unless of course they are rubies or diamonds or something that glitters. Otherwise, stones might serve as decorations or as markers on a path or as nuisances underfoot. Few would think of befriending a stone, much less going inside of one. That’s what Charles Simic’s poem, Stone, says to do.

The opening line—”go inside a stone”—speaks to the poetic heart. Going inside of things is an essential skill of romantics and artist and storytellers and poets. A stone may seem impenetrable, too dense to have an inner world. But when I go there:

the silence cradles me like a baby. I am as comfortable as a cat curled in the sun wherever I am. I know a place from the shape of gravity, the taste of moisture, the kiss of air. I feel the weight of substance and presence. I’m not like the apparitions in the mirror. My memory reaches way back in time before anyone carried me to an altar, or placed me in a garden, or kicked me from the trail; back to my birth out of gas, shot out of the molten belly of a volcano, hurtled from an alien elsewhere through empty space and dark matter to this moment, held in the palm of the hand of one who vows: Next time I meditate I will be a stone and the mountain it loves, even though that mountain is far, far away.

Prompt Menu

  1. Take Simic’s instructions, go inside of a stone, and journal or write a poem from that perspective

  2. Pick any other class of objects (from nature: leaves, sticks, grass, etc.,). Go inside and write from that perspective. Contrast the inside with the outside.

  3. Simic says a stone is a riddle from the outside: Journal or write about the stone’s riddle. What might it be? What makes it so enigmatic?

  4. Journal or write a poem about what it is like to be in the presence of the unanswerable.

  5. Write a biography of a stone: where it was born, how it lived, who touched and who tossed it, and how its story is etched on its inner walls.Or do the same with another thing.

  6. If you were contended as a stone, or your chosen object, what would you be happy to let other people be or do?

  7. What is a quality or trait that your chosen object retains even though it is impacted by other things in life like the cool quiet of the stone in Simic’s poem even though the cow steps full weight on it or a child tosses it in the river?

  8. As usual, write about anything else from the poem or life that inspires you