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The Link

Susan Ioannou
Reprinted from:   Looking Through Stone: Poems about the Earth. Sudbury: Your Scrivener Press, 2007.


No rock is lifeless,
or how could it cycle
to seethe, mound, and crumble?
An invisible anima
breathes akin to our own
a million times magnified and slowed.

For what are we,
but the calcium of bones,
the brines of underground seas
awash with magnesium, potassium, iron
filling the little caverns of our mouths
with our macroscopic plankton.

Our spirit may be as divinely simple
as a magnetic charge
attracting, repelling
subatomic cations and anions
that metamorphose
flesh's terrain.

And if our chemistry is no subtler
than heat upthrusting
a mountain range,
our physics
unfixed as lava,
what does it matter?

Except that like volcanic ash
earth is what we came from
and will become again.


Susan Ioannou's works copyright © to the author.


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