NC Poets on 9/11: Jeffery Beam’s “A Stone Falling, A Falling Stone”

Hillsborough’s Jeffery Beam is the author of numerous award-winning works including Gospel Earth (Skysill Press, England), Visions of Dame Kind (The Jargon Society), The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems 1969 – 2007 (White Crane), the song cycle Life of the Bee with composer Lee Hoiby, The Fountain (NC Wesleyan College Press) and the spoken word collection What We Have Lost: New & Selected Poems 1977–2001 (Green Finch). The Broken Flower (Skysill), MountSeaEden (Chester Creek) and a new edition of Midwinter Fires (Seven Kitchens Press) are due soon. He’s currently working on a commission for composer Jake Heggie and opera singer Andrea Moore with Allan Gurganus, Michael Malone, Frances Mayes, Lee Smith and Daniel Wallace entitled Family Secrets and a song cycle based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses with composer Steven Serpa. Beam is retiring soon from his work as a botanical librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill. Visit his website, www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/index.html.  Photo credit:  Barbara Tyroler.

A STONE FALLING,
A FALLING STONE

I am not afraid to fall.
Drop me from a tower & I
simply hit the earth.  Hold on
to me, I am earth still.
I want to fall, it is the first
dream for me. And the earth
my drum that I play.

A stone falling, a falling stone.
Whether I burn or not –
that’s beside the point.
The point, this:
when the earth
makes a stone
the sky still fathers it.
When the earth makes a stone,
it’s made for falling.

I am not afraid to fall.

(Originally published in A Time of Trial: Beyond the Terror of 9/11, Toronto, Canada: Hidden Brook Press, 2001)