This Heft in the Maker's Hand

Neolithic Hand Axe (5.2ins/ 13.3cm)

A very attractive Neolithic hand tool, exhibiting beautiful array of colours from the chalcedony stone, with darker mauve and green mottling and some indistinct veining to upper portion. Excellent flake workmanship, a robust, heavy duty sized Hand Axe tool, dating around 12,000- 6,500 years ago approximately.

Source: thefossilstore.com

The Stone

of Ten Thousand Years

James Hart

First, the maker loved the stone’s grave heft in his hand, black like clay infused with a volcano’s fiery throes.  He would give the stone mind and direction, flaking away chips until a beautiful tool emerged with cutting edges and rounded like a tongue.  Already the telltale taste of blood lingered in the stone’s single red blemish, and the maker dreamed of nameless beasts, their skins flayed away with ease, the meat he’d feed his people when they were safe in caves.  Odd, now, to dream his art shaping stone, how three simple dimples near the edge look like fingerprints pressed by the maker’s grip, yet to test them so today shows they fit the fingers, but no imagined skill in using the stone to slice a hide.  Some marks, after all, must be the nature of the stone, yet looking at it closer, how easy to see the minute scorings that ripple across it like time’s incised grain.  Perhaps a sandstone in one hand used to smooth the final shape, soapstone or shale to polish its dull luster until ten thousand years of use gave it a patina no man can plan.  Imagine how it passed from hand to hand, hunter to hunter, sire to son to son until even the passing of it was done.  How each descendant weighed the stone’s dense mass in his palm, or suspending it from his shoulder in a leather pouch, felt the stone’s supple nibble rubbing against his ribcage on his long treks across valleys, steppes, and mountains under moon scraped night.  Right now, I wonder if a poet soul ever walked among them, one man aware of the twin kingdoms he traveled between, or how the honed stone lifted the empire of death when he resurrected the quarry’s skin, the weathered pouch became the empire of time he carried at his side, the tracked path the tongue he walked upon to feed the hunger that lingered in his gut.

November 25, 2001; March 3, 2002; February 17, 2013

The stone of my poem is about the same size as the

example pictured, but it is totally different in color and in

workmanship. My mother, Alene Wagaman Hart, found it

in the bluff area south of Oak Hill Cemetery, Carrollton,

Missouri, when she was a teenager in the 1930's.