Bad-Ass

by E. Margareta Griffith

Yeah, okay, I'm in an air-conditioned box,
hurtling down a smooth road,
with hundreds of my kind,
toward a paved hole in the hills.

Red stones touch blue sky,
reaching from sunrise-gray rocks molded by wind and dynamite,
by no means an eternal flame, but close enough to fool my ephemeral kind.

The minerals will be there when our children are no longer our species.
The wind will tend the landscape when the highway is nothing more than travel-crumbs.
Water will smooth and crack the rocks without us to guide rivers or acidify rain.

Stones treat us gently, despite our violent adjustments,
to them we're mere newborns.
their bad-ass old age shows us up to be frail amateurs.

Our tantrums may spell the end of our toddlerhood,
or not.
The benevolent stones are unworried.