Rock Dwellers

POETRY

by Mark Belair

They sit or stand
atop an outcropping of rock
deep in the park, teenagers hanging out
after school, half-concealed by leafless trees, the rock
hard to a stone-block bridge, a pond icing the distance behind them,
the base of the boulder snow-encrusted, the whole tableau, from this distance, one

of cold
desolation that
the teens seem neither to defeat
nor succumb to, the craggy rock rising
like a deserted isle they’ve been shipwrecked to, their
strewn book bags and backpacks holding what they could salvage.

And while
young parents with children
cruise by and elderly couples stroll past
and younger schoolkids tumble all around them,
the teens seem inward-facing, groups forming and re-forming,
some joking and fun-punching and laughing, some entangled and kissing,

some lost
in conversation
or private thought—though
a few stare out as if stranded and
listening for a call or looking for a safe slope
down to the old flow they are ready to know anew.