Poetry

A granular particle

Grit had its way,
fouled my appliance—

as surely as a pea
stole sleep from a royal girl
or an errant nail saw a kingdom
lost or a swallowed fly,
the coroner said,
caused an elderly woman’s death.

Grit halted my hoover,
so recently bought—

hefted below to the cellar
where plasterboard walls almost
meet floor, my Dirt Devil vac
choked on the city’s foundational grit

that bore up the Reverend C.J. Street
penning sermons here in my home,
the 1911 census reports, ousted now
by my keyboard and mouse.

Carboniferous grit,
layered in a river’s expanding bed,
buried by limestone, coal, mud,
trodden by dinosaurs, quarried
from sandstone scarps, up to the task
of shredding toughened grain,

grit eroding downstream,
finding its way.

Jenny Hockey