|
This was much harder than it ought to have been. Poetry is the elephant in my room. Flash rule: Must contain a geologist I didn't kill mine, instead I took inspiration from a founding father of modern geology and the idea of deep time. Time Vaster than Death ~385 words Death waits like the jaws of a shark at the bottom of a rowboat tipped on end. Between sweat-soaked sheets at night, you contemplate how everyone you know will die. Their neurons will go dim and the latticework shadow that makes up their very selves will dissolve and run like ink into a drain beneath the great faucet of inevitability. But lest ye despair: James Hutton was a man who's long since met that dark and endless end. First a farmer, then a turner of stones, he found death in the bed of every creek, river and gorge. Man thought the world young in James Hutton's day, young enough to fit inside our pocketbook minds. It was off the coast of Berwickshire that a different tale was told, not a tale of man but that of stone and detritus and ruin and decay. Once, a continent bled mud and sand onto the floor of an ancient sea, sedentary grit like so much sloughed off skin, a slurry of things not living and things deceased. James Hutton, when he looked upon the rocky shore, saw a wrinkle in the gown of great mother earth, one wrinkle from one swirl of her green and blue ball gown and stole of clouds, one turn in her long and stately dance. Deep time, James Hutton named the rhythm of the planet's slow song, and he traced her steps backward through plodding, calamitous prehistory. Whole lands swallowed back into mother's skirts, children called home by the light of her fiery core to pay the debt of their birth. And so there you sweat, and there you agonize in a world of concrete, wood and petrol, that your essence will someday not be your own, that your life is so sacred, that your love is so profound, that you should continue where all else is given back into mother earth's fold. One hundred thousand pictures embroidered in the pattern of her dress, and you've been them, you'll be them as strata in stone, as lichen and moss; as the mud between a child's toes in generations to come, and sandstone in sublime and majestic cliffs. Living and dying, we feed the dance and as James Hutton penned: We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
|
| ← # ? Jan 14, 2013 04:11 |
|
