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Roger Caldwell

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A Piece of Petrified Wood

It remains there on the shelf - no doubt
my mother dusts it as she would have dusted me:

a piece of wood that’s stone, or stone
that looks like wood, a surrealist sculptor’s

final ambiguous artefact,  message to a world
of which he had as many doubts as it of him.

My father brought the relic back one day from work.
I was perplexed, a child, by adult mysteries.

He explained all to me with a smile:
‘It’s from Arizona. In a forest there

stand, perfectly preserved, primeval trees
now turned to stone’.  So cold in my warm hand

it was a thing to marvel at - in afterdays,
when marvels faded, lay untouched upon the shelf

with cacti likewise in an alien place
alongside miscellaneous modern tourist junk.

Modern, miscellaneous too,  I’ve cause to think
how much of me since then is turned to stone,

if what was tree and growing has become
hard, cold and set for ever, and recall

a scene as of a prehistoric age,
a moment set in amber, and miraculously preserved,

of a child's perplexity, the laughing eyes
of a father dead these fifteen years.

Page(s) 6

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