GHAAP - Sonnets from the Northern Cape

Ghaap
Sonnets from the Northern Cape
by Michael Cope

5 Dream

The stones reach to forever, harder than bones

in the slow system. Their thoughts do not decay.

The frost is as nothing. The day is a warm karos

pulled up around their unfathomable slumber.

Through the night they lie hard in my dreams,

the clear flake-marks making flow of the static

bands in the stone. In the dark of the spirit, without

words or events, without story: lithic minds.

Half-awake, fields of them testify their presence

to the domain of the inner eye. Inert. Primaeval.

Shaped by the progenitors. Older than all stories.

They crowd the head, tumble out onto the pillow,

awaiting the matching hand’s grasp that closes

but does not end the long telling of the stone tale.