Teaching A Stone To Talk, By Annie Dillard

I enjoy these essays' cogency,

the plain, heartfelt communication

of idiosyncratic and general Truth,

And that beyond one simpleton’s

trying to do this didactic work

for a rock on a shelf,

we, ourselves,

are the very stone,

the crust of a world 

that has learned to speak.

How did we do it?— Practice, man,

billions of years of hard practice,

with no instruction but success and failure—

intelligence, natural, increasing.