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The Stonemason’s Daughter
Helen Pizzey

was fluent in lost languages
of stone:

the inference of marble,
granite’s slant directness
and the clean enuncia on
of the dic on of slate.

Pocke ng words and phrases
spalled from weathered headstones,
or the vernacular of pebbles
washed-up from other shores,

she added them singly
to a monumental pile,
a cairn of casually-tossed,
loose remarks and
collected observa ons

showing where she’d been,
who she’d travelled with –
but not, as yet,
the rough-hewn tongues
of places s ll to visit.

First published in Seven, poems by seven Dorset writers
(Foreword Paul Hyland), imPULSE.press 2014

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