My brown daughter by the slate-gray sea

puts broken shells and bits of shale in stacks.

She crouches, digging down through sea-drift and debris

to make and build and fashion. A gull mocks

us both from a granite sky. Could it be

the same blest rage that made stonemasons bend their backs

at Chartres, Tikal, and Giza, block by block

raising a siege, waging their stubborn war on gravity?

They pressed up by pressing down, piling boulders till the earth cracked,

with torn hands, with shattered ribs and groans

to lift their priests up one step higher, or their dead. I see

and read the signs: a bird, a girl, a tower of rocks.

My child, you cannot fly for want of hollow bones;

we humans mount to heaven on heaps of stones.