Mike Stone's "Song of Symbols" tells us what it is in its first line, then uses its remaining few lines to show how a symbol actually comes into being. It begins with large, borrowed images (clocks, stars, a kite on a string) and ends with a small blue flower on a hill and a name: Noellen. The central idea seems to be that we reach for grand emblems when we think about time, distance and longing, but the symbols that matter are the ones we make privately, by looking at something in front of us and seeing a person in it.
The first stanza is a list that behaves like a riddle. "It" has no clear antecedent, so we start mid-thought, as if the speaker were describing a whole atmosphere rather than one object. Clocks and stars are both ways of measuring or navigating, but they pull in opposite directions. One suggests small, ticking, human time, the other ancient and almost motionless distance. Then comes the strangest image: "A string tied to a rock, / At the other end, a kite." The line break holds the kite back, so we meet the weight before we meet the thing that wants to rise. Rock and kite are opposites, ground and air, and the string between them is pure tension. Judging by the imagery, the stanza is about being tethered, something light and hopeful held by something that will not move. A kite fastened to a rock has no hand to fly it, which gives the picture a faint loneliness.
After that the poem shrinks. The stanzas run four lines, then two, then one, like a lens being focused. "One small blue wildflower / On this slow grassy hill" brings us down from the abstract to a place. The word "this" matters, because the speaker is suddenly somewhere, pointing at something. Clocks and stars were everywhere and nowhere, while the hill is here. It is also "slow," an adjective that quietly answers the clocks of the first stanza. Time on this hill seems to be measured by grass rather than by ticking.
The last line, "A little like Noellen, I think," is where the song of symbols actually happens. The flower is never announced as a symbol. It becomes one through a simile so modest it nearly apologises. "A little like" and "I think" are two hedges in one short line, and they make the feeling believable, since real affection is often tentative at the moment of noticing. We are told nothing about who Noellen is, and the poem is wise not to say. We can infer only that the speaker finds her delicate and singular, as one wildflower on a wide hill is. Whether she is absent or simply near is left for the reader to decide.
There is no rhyme, and the short lines read like quiet speech, but sound still does careful work. Sibilance runs through the poem ("song," "symbols," "stars," "string," "small," "slow"), and those hushed s-sounds keep the voice low, almost a murmur. "Clocks" and "rock" echo each other, linking time to weight. In "One small blue wildflower," three stressed syllables fall close together ("small blue wild"), forcing the voice to slow down, and "slow grassy hill" does the same. The rhythm becomes the slowness it describes.
The poem is significant for what it demonstrates rather than explains. It promises a song and delivers a half-spoken thought, but in doing so it shows the difference between a symbol we inherit and one we find. Clocks and stars belong to everyone. The flower belongs to one speaker and one remembered person. By narrowing from four lines to one, the poem suggests that meaning gathers around particular people, and that the most honest way to say so may be to add, quietly, "I think."