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

No comments:

Post a Comment