Orogeny

tides of stone
rising

above the earth
the sun and moon

in a heaven without gods nothing exists
but the necessity of their invention

we who are too small to be seen
orbit on this crazed blue world
through emptiness

forces of nature cause the tides inside us
that ebb and flow across everything
we might become in our rocky souls

uplift we thought
was our striving toward light
and in the days after today
our reaching beyond the void

uplift we found was the earth
quaking beneath our feet drawing
an ocean bed over us like a sheet
raising what was beneath us
to unimaginable heights

orogeny was never within our gift
though we tried to dig deep
into the veins of soil and bedrock
and in our dreaming tried to chisel
and blast our way to some destiny of stone

but we are made of the world as much
as we are made of the stars’ dust

we are made by colliding energies as fleeting
as the echoes of mountains being made
as invisible as weather wearing them away

we are made of illusion
fashioned in its image
foolish enough to think we have power
too weak to shape anything
but our one brief second of time

© BH, 2018

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I revisited ‘Orthogenesis’ a few days ago. To send the link to a friend. That was about evolution but I had also in mind something more geological. I’d not written about that. Until this particular mountain of words erupted through the crust of my thoughts.

The image shows a fold from the Caledonian Orogeny in Greenland in King Oskar Fjord plus Jason deCaires Taylor’s public art installation The Rising Tide near Vauxhall Bridge.