Here’s an odd little poem I came across:
Astragaloi
We know there must be consciousness in things,
In bits of gravel pecked up by a hen
To grind inside her crop, and spider silk
Just as it hardens stickily in air,
And even those things paralyzed in place,
The wall brick, the hat peg, the steel beam
Inside the skyscraper, and lost, forgotten,
And buried in ancient tombs, the toys and games,
Those starry jacks, those knucklebones of glass
Meant for the dead to play with, toss and catch
Back of the hand and read the patterns of,
Diversions to beguile the endless time,
Never to be picked up again…They’re thinking,
Surely, all of them. They are lost in thought.
Mark Jarman, from To The Green Man, Saraband Books
