"A heart of stone" is one of those phrases we use without thinking, usually to call someone cold or cruel. Arinola's poem takes the expression and does something unexpected with it. Instead of judging a hard-hearted person from outside, it lets us listen from within, and what the speaker hears is not silence but noise.
The poem is built as a before and after. In the first half the speaker remembers a time when "the sound in my chest was soft" and the heart was still "Human." Then comes pain, "Great and Sad," and the hardening that follows. The central idea is that numbness, which looks like an escape from hurt, brings its own suffering. A stone heart should feel nothing, yet this one "screeches." The speaker has swapped one kind of damage for another and lost something essential on the way. The inverted phrase "Human it was" puts the key word first, as if the speaker is mourning it.
There is no rhyme and no steady beat, so nothing cushions the lines. Each lands as a flat statement. The poem relies on balance instead. Three pairs of adjectives mark its stages: "Soft and moist," "Great and Sad," "Hard and Dry." The first and last are near opposites, like two photographs of the same person years apart, while the middle pair names the pain that caused the change. The two painful pairs are capitalised mid-line, and the soft one is not. That may be deliberate, since "Sad" and "Dry" certainly stand up on the page in a way "moist" doesn't.
Punctuation is almost absent. The only mark in the whole poem is the comma in "And now," which works like a held breath before the damage is described. With no full stop at the end, the final line stays open, and the ice is still flowing when the poem stops.
The most striking craft is in the sound imagery. Early on, the heartbeat is "The clapping of flesh on blood," a strange, wet, almost applauding noise. Near the end it becomes "the grinding of granite on ice." The two phrases share the same shape, a noun, then "of," then two things meeting. But every sound has hardened. "Clapping" is soft and rounded, while "grinding of granite" is full of hard g's and a rasping r, so the reader's mouth does some of the work. "Screeching" adds to the effect. Reading the lines together, it seems the heart is the granite and the blood has become the ice, and the screech is the sound of one scraping against the other with every beat. That is an inference, but the matching structure strongly supports it.
The ice carries a small paradox. Ice doesn't flow, but "flows" is a blood word, and the poem lets the old verb cling to the new substance. We feel what has been replaced. The last two lines repeat almost exactly, changing only "through me" to "in my vein," and the repetition acts like a pulse that refuses to stop. The singular "vein" could be a slip or a choice. If it is a choice, it narrows the body to a single cold channel.
The poem also describes the pain in only the vaguest terms. "Great and Sad" is abstract, while the body gets all the sensory detail: softness, moisture, dryness, screeching. Perhaps that is the point. Grief is hard to describe, but its effects on a person are unmistakable.
What makes the poem worth studying is how much it does with plain words and short lines. It revives a worn-out idiom by giving it sound, temperature and texture. It also names no cause, no person and no event behind the hurt, only "the pain it brought me." That openness lets any reader step into the speaker's place. Its quiet warning is that armour built against pain may not bring peace, because a heart that has turned to stone can still be heard.