Fault Lines

Another geography poem 😉

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Here at the margins
Where two plates meet
Nature’s crucible
Works her magic

A battle is fought
Jagged and jarring
Building in power
Until the earth shakes

Yet occasionally the clash
Is less of a dash and more of a charge
Mountains forming, pushing, heaving upwards
Neither one relenting, in a reach for the sky

But sometimes the direction is downwards, not up
Where power unseen stirs the cauldron of transformation
One plate giving way to the other
And destruction is only the next step on the path
To creation, formation, construction, generation

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Written for Weekend Writing Prompt #190 – Marginal in 31 words (I used “margins”), and Weekend Writing Prompt #191 – Crucible in 100 | Word Count: 96 – because this was written for two separate prompts, my aim was to simply write under the most generous word limit of the two.

Glacial Geomorphology – a poem

temperatures dropped and
the glaciers grew
their fingers of ice
encroaching further and further

where glacier met stone
they fought and they battled
the ice triumphant
grinding the other to dust (2)

They brought with them erratics (3)
boulders carried great distances
which were allowed to wander
with the help of the ice

compositionally different to
the stone of the area
left behind to confuse (4)
when the glacier retreated

* * * * *

1. Glacial geomorphology – the study of the landscape, processes and features of glaciers
2. this fine sediment is known as glacial milk or rock flour
3. erratic – from the Latin errare meaning “to wander”: a rock often strikingly different to that of the local geology
4. the presence of erratics were hard to explain, often attributed to ancient great floods, until scientists of the later 18th and 19th centuries made the connection to glaciers.

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Written for Weekend Writing Prompt #110 – Glacial | word count 67 – 1 word over! Sigh…