Walking by a pile of ordinary granite
my daughter noticed a glimmer.
Delighted with the sparkly sight,
she asked me why it shone so,
It's just DG, I said plainly,
So, you don't know,
she replied rhetorically.
I too remember when
the world was more than real
you could feel the newly forming
foundations building up
under you, from deep inside
your hot energetic core
spreading slowly like land
determined and undeterred
not oblivious and permeable
nor in the hurry of water
its mad dash with a splash
molten rock chooses to ooze instead
I remember a time
when steam jets barely cooled our fires
and together we tamed the wild world,
before us digging up and burying forevermore
weary from moving around in endless Revolutions
We finally settled.
Like throwing pepper around the perimeter
so pedestrian people wont notice
tremors of short fused attentions
unable to make the connection, cross the bridge
to take the leap, to draw a rough line,
to reconnect
the connection of
the extra and ordinary.
From leading edges, subdued and stable
the matrix locks its labyrinth
in the basement
of continental islands.
Granite is there.
Unanimously equigranular,
metamorphically unique,
on this marble rolling
in concrete space.
Catching the light just right
the quartz and phenocrysts insist
on throwing off latent sparks;
like kindled memories of plutonic days
mingled in potassium feldspar rays
streaked pink with passion
the blushing boulders
pushed by Sisyphus
eternally carry us forward
as though not moving a pebble,
or grain, or granule, granum, granite
swallowing our diamonds along the way
decomposing
and eroding
molding
the upper crust
down to
their carbon core.
One should never ignore
the things we take for granite.
Image by Halvard Hatlen (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
