More Stones
Day 44 — Soil and Peace — Carpathian Dispatch
The path takes stones. It has taken them all summer — flat ones for the treads, broken ones for the fill, carried up from where the slope sheds them.
The hands that passed them were not all mine.
More stones. More stones. It started as a joke. Then it was a chant. Then it was just the work.
High above the valley the rock splits. A corridor of stone, moss on the shaded faces, spruce roots holding the rim. The trail through it is loose scree and root.
On one wall, a carving. Two circles, joined. Beneath them, a date: 1910.
Ivan Franko summered in Kryvorivnia, the next village down the river. He walked these mountains in exactly those years. Whether the mark is his hand or the hand of someone who climbed there because of him, the valley tells it as his visit.
He wrote a poem about stonecutters — men breaking a road through rock for others to walk after them. His grave carries the stonecutter, not the poet.
Твердий змуруємо гостинець, і за нами
Прийде нове життя, добро нове у світ.
We will pave the hard road, and after us
new life will come, a new good into the world.
The path below is nearly covered now. It does not know whose hands laid it.
More stones.
Day 44 — Aufbau — Soil and Peace
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | Soil and Peace | CC BY-SA 4.0
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