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Little Sisyphus

by Jane Monson©


The earth parts above its head and light pours through the hole like rain. Until now, the dark had been its roof. Then broken by a crown that could thread the eye of a needle, this smooth patch of mud is undone; unlevelled from below. In one burst, this lowly penny-sized plot of land is given character; from a single shove, a hill is formed; the effect barely more than a pin’s journey through a wall, the plaster behind the paint opened into, the silt falling, moving and settling either side of the wound. Outside, the weight of sun and rock barely felt upon its back, the ant starts to build with the earth. In the journeys between one boulder of soil and the next, paths are being formed. The ant returns again and again to the same hill through crevices, drying lakes and a particularly windblown stretch. Soon the land starts to behave like a place; a setting without a name, where the ant goes about its business, deafening the world below as it works between the light and the dark, carrying the rocks to the top of the hill, grappling its mouth around the earth’s crust, speaking all day in stone.

Dropping the sounds like bombs and starting again.

Prose Poem from Speaking Without Tongues (Cinnamon Press: Oct 2010)
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