Moon at Half Past Noon

I spent a year polishing a stone,
a common grey thing from the garden bed.
I worked it with the grit of my own doubt,
the wet of my ambition, till it shone
a shallow light, a mirror for my head.
I called this progress, building from without.

The sun, each day, would warm it in my palm.
The rain would taste its new, unnatural skin.
It drank the light I could not give, and grew
a deeper sheen, a quiet, inner calm
that I could not, by effort, put within.
It learned a grace I never taught or knew.

My hands, chafed raw, learned patience from the task.
The stone, in turn, learned how to hold a spark.
We were two solitudes, a pact of two—
one giving labor, one a passive mask.
We wore the time down to a single mark,
a shared erosion, making something new.

Then one still evening, by the window’s fire,
the stone no longer sat apart, a prize.
Its curve reflected not my face, but air,
the window frame, the branching of a briar,
the whole dark room within its liquid eyes.
It held the world, and I was also there.

I set it down upon the weathered sill.
The moon was rising, and the air was cool.
I felt the polish on my own worn soul,
a smoothness born of friction, not of will.
The boundary lines surrendered their hard rule;
the stone, the air, the night were one, and whole.

The work goes on—the polishing, the slow
unfolding of a self against the world.
The inside sculpts the outside, and the outside, deep,
re-shapes the inside, teaching it to grow.
But in the space between breaths, truth is curled:
The mountain was already in the sleep
of the common stone. The ocean in the tear.
The polisher, the polished, disappear.