She picked up a pebble, licked it.

tasted the sweet salt of its skin and let it fly

back into the sea with a practised twist

of her lovely wrist.

She smiled at her lover, never recalled

the look, texture, weight, of the neat missile chosen by chance

(a small, grey, flawed sphere, nothing more).

The pebble, in its infinite time

a volcano's heart, talisman of a lost island,

the plaything of a kraken, otter's comforter, molten jewel, a star,

home to creatures that crawled like nightmares in the oozy deep,

anchor for green tendrils reaching to the light from the hulking carcass

of some lost nation's great last hope;

the pebble, smoothed by the sea's caress

from the jagged side

of a continent home to unimaginable

beasts slithering

over flowers or spiralling ferns

that crumbled to dust and ash 

upon that beach when the sea was still fire;

the pebble flittered and glided 

back through aeons of infinitesimal

ups and downs at the whim of weather,

random currents and the vortices

of a thousand ship propellors

to land with a soft sigh of silt and wait -

for just a few fractions of its small grey life -

to be back on the sand

and chosen to fly from another lover's hand.