At your funeral
Wisterias and silence
Even the wind dies
Ryan Stone
In Passing
You’re Missing
Spring cleaning windows
a paw print from last summer
fractures the sunlight
– Ryan Stone
How quickly the years slip past. Gone but never forgotten, old mate.
Drinking the Dawn
A young elephant can die
of a broken heart
should his mother leave.
I was an elephant once
just for a time.
Then I stood up,
tusk and trunk,
like she taught me –
stepped onto the prairie;
dry eyes drinking the dawn.
Ryan Stone
The Darkest Night
The mind has many defences, she wrote
in her award-winning essay. Glowing,
she stood in front of her school;
movie tickets her prize.
Painted in shades between girl and woman
she kissed me goodbye with bright red lips
and joined her friends in line.
The mind has many defences, she wrote.
Maybe that’s why, in police reports,
many claimed they’d heard fireworks.
Odd in a cinema; the alternative
too grim to believe.
– Ryan Stone
First published in Poppy Road Review, February 2016
days of stone 