A photo booth of four days

It’s a new season, but I’ve been gone for as many weeks,
in as many months, as years since the last. A coincidence, to be sure
(though I did fudge the numbers a little). They say it’s inauspicious—
I suppose they too have never seen the stone among stones,
and so heard the wrong tones, unfurled the wrong tongues.
Such are the languages we speak: interchangeable, wrong, sufficient;
still yet I listen, proud, indifferent, as though I may understand.