Excerpt from Susan Ioannou’s book of poetry Looking Through Stone – Poems About the Earth. If you would like to order Susan Ioannou’s book of poetry, go to Your Scrivener Press
SEDIMENTARY ROCK
Near Earth’s surface
whatever the sun
heats and cools,
swells, softens, and shrinks,
is dried out, weakened,
and splits off.
Whatever water and ice pick at
and winds have dropped
weathers into layers,
loose compost, clay, and sand
that grain by grain dissolve
and seep down
and melting into groundwater, form
minerals lustrous as copper
in enrichment zones,
as myriad
as there are organisms
and oxygen in ample supply,
or carbonic acid
for microbes to decay,
as motley as calcium swirled in shells
or skeletons pressed into silica
before sinking back to stone
—lithified.