Group of Three Magic Stones by Barbara Hepworth 1973 (Kettles Yard Cambridge)
The retired nurse finally found one at seventy on the beach at Wells. It has the silver tongue and flatness of the Aussie pilot’s vowels. He had accepted her virginity in the war without a fuss and had sent her long letters on thin paper. She listens to the stone whisper at midnight as she lies in bed with tea and digestives. He re–tells the correspondence, recounts the end of days. She notes that he wrote a great deal about the Mess.
An old Carmelite nun in Wales uses hers as the surface of all things. A smooth textural stone she found near an estuary as a child. Her father walked with her there, naming the seagulls, the formation of clouds. It is a map that traces her way through memory and back to God. In her hand she travels what was before and what will be again. She knows about the journey, the nature of angles and shadow. During early Mass it warms her body in the chapel. Others recognise a certain change in her.
The florist with grey eyes hides a stone in a kitchen drawer. She thought of wearing it around her neck as a heavy talisman, against the ills that befell her but stones are all history and have no sense of time. She cannot recall where she found it, having stared at her feet for so long in the sure and certain hope of her resurrection as a woman who possesses such a stone. Held up, it reflects her lost child in flight like a photo-booth snap. She raises it to the evening light as she waits for the pasta to cook.
As for me, there may be a fourth. I am searching for the stone that allows itself to be seen as a whole. It will have a pulse so that it would almost throb, like desire. I would place it at the back in case it judders off. Each face and plane that gives it strength but completeness could be suffocating to others and myself, given the type of woman I am. It is wise that the fourth keeps to itself and does not search me out. Three is a powerful number, it is stronger than the corners of a room, seasons, horsemen of the Apocalypse.
• Andrea Porter is a member of the poetry performance group Joy of Six
that has performed in Britain and New York. She has been published in a
number of poetry magazines (both paper and online) in the UK , Canada ,
Australia and USA . Her narrative sequence of poems Bubble
was adapted for Radio 4 as a drama by the RSC playwrite Fraser Grace.
She received an Escalator Award from the British Arts Council (East)
and The New Writing Partnership in 2006 to complete a novel. She sleeps
either too little or too much. www.joyofsix.co.uk
