too much coffee, too little sleep, a love of words…
The slender-billed curlew has officially been declared extinct by the IUCN — the first bird in history to vanish across three continents: Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Once a graceful traveller between seasons, it’s now a silence stretching from marsh to sky.
Some songs end where the wind begins.
Sky burial is a sacred Tibetan ritual where the body is returned to nature, offered to birds of prey as an act of release and renewal.
They say it frees the soul.
But grief isn’t so easily lifted.
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
It’s a quiet thing, a word found
in the stillness of dawn
while dreamers slumber
and the new moon succumbs
to day. A fading thought,
soft intake of breath
in the long pause
between sleep and wake.
Sometimes it’s hope
enduring wildfire, flood,
or the dusts of time.
Maybe dinosaur bones,
a lost tomb, or scarecrows
guarding lavender fields.
Perhaps a dew-drizzled
cobweb, a jonquil, cloud
or song. Most often
it’s your breath,
soft and steady,
promising one more day
in which I will belong.
Ryan Stone
Ochre
soaked skies, sunrise
woke her –
blue grass
seas lilt behind
stained glass
at dawn.
On morning’s grace
she’s borne.
Ryan Stone
Do you know how it feels
to stand alone in a forest
in the caesura
of a gathering storm?
With a graceful pirouette
the north wind about-faces
and just as quickly
a sou’ wester replaces
the breathy, dry kisses
of long afternoons in the sun.
Drawing breath from your lungs
and heat from your soles,
lowercase twisters
scatter leaves with abandon.
There’s a pause,
it is electric,
then thunder above.
A first splash, the herald,
caresses your skin
and whispers of days
when you sucked the air in
and laughed until laughter ran dry;
when you danced and you sang
and timeless, you lay
entwined ‘neath an indigo sky.
In that place, alone,
your lenses will fail
and your notebook fall
by the by.
Your shutter can’t capture
the depths of magenta;
your pen,
the dreaming Magpie.
It’s a moment,
just a moment,
before the storm breaks
and the old song
resumes its same rhyme.
Do you feel it?
Can you grab it?
A resolution, of sorts:
to wring from
each minute
a lifetime.
by Ryan Stone
No path here.
Just damp earth,
moss on stone,
and the slow, deliberate hush
of growing things.
Tree ferns arc overhead,
fronds wide as arms,
filtering light
into something sacred.
I brought my sons here,
when their legs were small
and full of mud.
They squatted in the black soil,
drew patterns with sticks,
found joy
in a single wriggling earthworm.
The ferns, the filtered light—
none of it mattered.
Only dirt,
and the way it stuck
to their knees,
their laughter,
my heart.
Now I pass alone.
The moss is thicker.
Their prints long gone.
But I see them—
the shape they made
in that moment,
still held
in the hush beneath the fronds.
And I smile,
because some things—
mud,
love,
the wonder of being their dad—
cling forever.
Ryan Stone
This one is from my new poetry collection – Love, and Other Ordinary Miracles – soon to be released on Amazon.
Dusky pink moonlight
Cherry blossom arabesque
Dreaming tomorrows
Ryan Stone
days of stone 