Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Shape-Shifting: The Metamorphic Rocks



Thin sheets of sediment,
amorphous phyllo,                  
acres in extent, are
buried under flows
of gravel, mud or lava;

each horizontal layer
descends beneath the
weight of new deposits
and in the process
sheds its water and its air.

As pressure forces grains
together, coats them
with a fine cement of
minerals emerging
slick from their dense solutions,

new rock begins to grow
like baklava, placed
down in sheets of phyllo,
honey, butter, nuts
in shallow pans of salten sea,

and even as the rock
is formed, the sea with
its encompassing land
moves gently forward
to converging boundaries,

where continents collide
with oceans, islands
form and disappear, where
sheets of rock slide down
to fiery depths, are shaken,

torn, and softened so the
sheeted layers of rock
can now be pushed and pinched
and pleated into
vast accordions of stone.

There, too, in infinite,
slow, furious, tumult,
the very substance of

the rock is changed, its
molecules and atoms shift,

bonds break, decay, re-form
on microscopic
dancing floors where atoms
waltzing, reeling, twirl
new substance into being.

Limestones turn to marble
then, and shales to slate
and schist; new rocks emerge,
new stones are born as
matter glides to sleeker form.

Immensities of rock
are sunken, twisted,
cooked, like crumpled sheets of
baklava, which baked
in subterranean stoves, will

someday rise and rising
shake the very earth
which they create and then
in geologic
time, dissolve and start anew.

Shape-shifting stone that slides
into fresh form and
essence new, as heat and
depth and time supply B
this is metamorphic rock!

Sr. Sue Elwyn, SSJD
St-Lambert, QC 2005

Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō Eruption 1983 . USGS

Friday, October 5, 2018

Emiliania Huxleyi























Emiliania Huxleyi 
a tiny one-celled alga so small
it takes five thousand lined into a
row to fill a single inch of space  –

contain within each single cell a
mitochondrion, Golgi body, 
nucleus and chloroplast, all that
it needs to feed and reproduce

and at the last to die – essential
elements of life as we know it;
infinitesimal perfection,
pulling nourishment from watery light.

And more – a coccolithophore, it
builds within itself exquisite shields,
fretworks of calcium and carbon
known as coccoliths, astounding shapes

produced inside a tiny globe by
means half-understood, for reasons
quite unknown, these oval wheels with spokes
and rims and two-tiered delicacy,

extruded whole and lovely from the
cell, garnish their maker, sitting rim
to rim or overlapping, twenty or
more around the sphere’s circumference.

Emiliania Huxleyi
are insignificant alone, but
in their billions stain water milky-
white in blooms a hundred miles across.

Thus their life; and when they die, they sink
for weeks through ocean depths to come to
rest at last on the abyssal plain,
sit softly on limey sediment.

Then over countless spans of time, the
slimy mass grows thick with age, sly
cementation fills pores between each
microscopic block, and in the end

it turns to limestone, dolomite or
chalk; a million years may pass as one-
celled algae live and reproduce and
die and in their deaths build depths of stone.

Then sheets of sedimentary rock are
carried on the tides of earth and rise
by gentle increment to make the
underlying crust of continents,

or galvanized by cataclysmic
force build mountain ranges standing tall –
wondrous, one-celled, earth-shaping algae,
Emiliana Huxleyi!
                                               
                                                

Sr. Sue Elwyn, SSJD
Toronto, March, 2006