…And now for something completely different!
This past weekend, my family gathered in Capon Springs, West Virginia, to celebrate my mother’s 70th birthday. She asked for an unusual birthday gift – an original poem from each member of the family. Writing poetry isn’t something most of us do, but my mom was an English teacher in her career, and poetry is important to her. Collectively, we acquiesced and set our pens to paper.
Ultimately, I found my muse in the geologic history of my state. While I don’t expect my epic to win any literature awards with the results, I feel like it’s perhaps worthwhile to share it here. Writing it was a unique exercise in my mind’s experience. As you’ll see, I wasn’t entirely able to get away from jargon (and in fact, the toothsome flavor of geology words is one of the reasons it’s so fun to write about, as John McPhee has noted), but I did manage to come up with a few new ways of describing geologic actions. See what you think.
If you write any geopoetry (a phrase popularized by Harry Hess) of your own, I hope you’ll post a link to it in the comments below. If you’re an educator who uses poetry or other creative (nontechnical) writing in your geoscience courses, I’d be keen to hear about that too. Prior to this past week, it never would have occurred to me to assign poetry to students, but I think it could be an option for the right student.
Without further ado, here’s my geological history of Virginia, translated into a poem:
Deep sockets of magma
An oatmeal of chunkety crystals
Gradual uplift, a feldspar at a time
Seeping, soaking hot days
Freezing nights; prying fingers of frost
A loose mountain dandruff of grus
Seismic judder
Hissing and gurgling from a crumbling crack
Steam in thickets the color of cheese
Upwelling earthsap, exploratory lobes stretching and bubbling
Glassy rinds congealing, shattering, turning over and being resorbed
Topped next century by another
Lava stacked on lava, half a mile thick
And one day, it’s over, and time goes by and nothing but entropy happens
Heat is dissipated; the cold rock contracts and sinks
Before fifty million years have elapsed, the cool kiss of the sea
is lapping at this monument to past excitement
Pebbles accrue; sand piles up
Estuarine muck and clay receive the footprints of seafloor scuttlers
A Cambrian Davy Jones’ locker, full of trilobites
An freight train of sand convulses by,
its caboose shot through with bristles and tubes
Clearing waters, Bahamanian distillates
Seafloor hailstones rolling and growing
Gritty-hearted gobstoppers of Paradise
Seaslime domes grazed by terrible snails
A hundred thousand millennia of aquatic ions meeting, linking,
raining out like cold smoke
Puddinglike carbonate goo
Studded with walnut husk brachiopods
Traced with echinoderm stems
Each year, an iotasworth blanket of fresh lime weighed down the bottom
and the seafloor subsided by one iotasworth
A shallow eternity, until the bottom dropped out
Vertigo as we peer into the unlit depths
Two hundred miles to the east, an brutal archipelago approached
Ancient Tamboras and Pinatubos convulsing in heaving thunder
Ash sifted into the sea, settling to the ever receding bottom
Submarine landslides gushed silently and slowly by,
Phantasmic leviathans each leaving a trace of sand draped in mud
Like a conveyer belt delivering groceries,
subductive peristalsis at an Iapetan trench
drew Africa ever closer
Soon Mauritania and Morocco were nuzzling up
Insistent and then violent
Wrenching pressure that, in the end, could not be resisted
A slow motion wreck,
arching them up, tipping them back, shoving them westward,
and up and up and up
Trauma caused changes:
The ancient lava turned green as it cooked
The ancient mud took on a splitting fabric
The ancient sand distorted, speck by speck, to the shape of a fleet of minuscule zeppelins
Where once there had been ocean
Mountains now rose
Beneath them, the strata once parallel with the horizon now buckled and piled
Atop them, landslides and debris flows coursed downhill
carrying newly liberated clasts
Among them, grains of zircon
Which journeyed fro their Appalachian source on Permian Mississippis westward
to their “final” resting place among the Araucaria trees of Arizona
Before that Forest was Petrified, it was buried in Alleghanian detritus
The crunching and grinding and thickening and erosion and flow
grew the lofty Appalachian seam,
stitching the heart of Pangaea in an Alpine colossus
When the tectonic tide began to ebb
It was expressed as a series of fissures, rending the crust
To the beat of earthquakes and avalanches
These Triassic Olduvais yawned wide, gulping gravel
The shores of its lakes pressed by the feet of therapsids
Faults tapped the hot mantle,
conducting and weeping basalt over the continental wound
One of these rifts stretched so wide, the supercontinent broke clean in two
One piece of Pangaea scooted east,
while our land headed west
The Atlantic flexing wide in their mutual wake
Shorelines twitching back and forth;
Sea level unable to make up its mind
Each transgression leaving a fresh blanket of shells
A comet dunked hard
through these layers and into the crust beneath
spewing molten rock up and down the coast
An annular trough and a central peak beneath the Chesapeake
More layers laid down, full of steroidal scallops
and the cast-off teeth of cartilaginous patrols
Cold times came, and the rivers bit in
chewing downward through the old cold rock
The landscape stretched itself vertically,
newfound relief like an exaggerated memory of the bygone glory days