Glacial Erratic

A granite shoulder in a field of limestone, you arrived without fanfare — no crater, no scorch mark, just the slow release of a grip ten thousand years in loosening, the ice retreating like a thought abandoned. They call you erratic, as if wandering were a flaw. But you were carried with such patience, cradled in a tongue of frozen melt that knew exactly where to set you down and leave. The farmers plow around you. Their fences bend. You teach the field a different grammar — igneous among the sedimentary, a word from another language holding its ground. Lichen colonizes your north face in slow green script, writing a chronicle no one will read in full. Rain pools in your hollows. Small creatures drink from the cupped palms of your silence. What does it mean to belong somewhere you were never born? You fit the way a bell fits its silence — not by shape, but by the ringing that continues after everything has stopped.