too much coffee, too little sleep, a love of words…
The sky doesn’t hum like it used to.
We traded songs
for signal towers
and forgot the sound
of wings over wheat.
Benches sit empty
in parks built for someone else’s childhood.
Swings move only with the wind now,
no laughter to push them.
We speak in pings
and half-hearted hearts,
thumb-pressed love
and silence that scrolls on
longer than grief.
We taught our children
to fear the quiet
but not to cherish it.
We gave them passwords
instead of prayers.
And still,
the earth waits.
Somewhere,
a fox curls beneath a rusted fence,
a girl cups a candle like a secret,
and the wind remembers
how to sing.
Ryan Stone
Grief came quiet—
shoved in gloveboxes
with old rego papers
and blunt tools
kept for no reason.
Tears weren’t banned,
just lost
between Dad’s silence
and busted knuckles,
between she’ll be right
and a door
that clicks shut slow.
We didn’t cry
when the dog died,
didn’t cry at the funeral,
didn’t cry
when she walked out.
Just sat there.
Fence posts in floodwater.
We break
in the gut,
in the jaw,
in the muscle it takes
to say I’m fine.
No one taught us
where to put the weight,
only
not to drop it.
Ryan Stone
for the ones who sing into silence
Somewhere below the shimmer line
where light forgets itself,
a whale turns slow in a cathedral of salt—
each scar on her skin
a stanza.
She sings,
not to summon,
not to find—
but to remember.
A song older than shipwrecks.
Older than ropes and sails.
The deep drinks it.
Holds it like breath.
Lets it echo
along trenches where no eyes go,
only ghosts
and pressure
and time without hands.
We used to think it was a beacon,
a call to others.
But not all songs seek ears.
Some are memory
made into sound—
just one creature
telling the dark:
I was here.
Ryan Stone
Some nights,
when the wind shifts
and the silence settles deep,
I step out barefoot
onto the cold veranda.
Above the gum trees—
the Southern Cross,
low and steady,
like it’s waiting for me
to notice.
It doesn’t blaze,
just holds its shape,
a quiet thing
pointing the way
I’ve always known
but needed to remember.
Not a map.
Not a promise.
Just a reminder
that home
isn’t something you reach—
it’s the walking,
the choosing,
the light you carry
when the dark won’t lift.
Ryan Stone
Birds don’t stop in this town.
I see them fly past, black peppering
blue, going someplace. I’ve given up
dreaming wings. This town
will know my bones. Condoms
sell well in Joe’s corner store – boredom breeds
but breeding’s a trap, a twitch in the smile
of those steel-eyed shrews
who linger late after church.
I walked half a day, out past the salt flats,
after they closed the movie house down. Smoked
the joint she’d brought back from college
when she returned to bury my dad.
I remember how pale her fingers lay
across my father’s hands –
coal miner’s hands, tarred like his lungs;
like this town.
Ryan Stone
First published in Eunoia Review, July 2016.
Winner of the Goodreads Monthly Poetry Contest, August 2016.
First Place in Poetry Nook contest 101, November 2016.
days of stone 