Rai (The Family Stone)

Lyrics

You walk the path near the village of Gachpar.
The air is heavy with hibiscus and damp earth.
And you see it.

Tilted slightly, like a listening ear.
Six feet of calcite, quarried from an ancient reef.
A great, pale wheel with a hole for a soul.
It has rested in this clearing, under this breadfruit tree, for a hundred years.
It has not moved.

This is the fei.
This is the proof.
A value known from every roof.
It is owned without being held.
Its history is its bond.

Its story begins four hundred miles away.
In the Rock Islands of Palau.
A perilous voyage on an outrigger canoe, a moonless night, a snapped rope.
The names of the lost are carved into its value, unseen.
The journey is the mint mark. The risk is the gold.

This is the fei.
This is the proof.
A value known from every roof.
It is owned without being held.
Its history is its bond.

The first family owned the journey.
The second, the marriage it secured.
The third, the land it purchased.
This family, the fourth, they own the memory of all three.
William Furness saw it in 1910. He wrote it down.
"Ownership," he wrote, "is a matter of common knowledge."
The stone doesn't move. The story does.

A child runs by, slaps its mossy face for luck.
Her grandmother watches from her doorway.
She knows. The village knows.
The stone is theirs.
Resting.
Witnessing.
Owned without being held.