What Are Rocks For?

 A Liturgy of Deep Time

For being older than me, memory, or myth—
for giving up a history, layer upon layer, under pressure,
for recording the silent closing of a vanished sea.

For telling stories in the language of strata.
For marking the unconformity of time itself.
For the deep archive waiting in the planet's silence.

For slow magma cooled miles beneath the light. 
For mica, quartz, and feldspar: the mosaic of granite. 
For granite, the crystalline foundation of continents. 
Exhumed, it stands against the open weather— 
yielding only to the patience of weathering, 
till erosion claims the rubble.
For bearing the stress of mountain building,
and teaching the craton  how to endure.

For Earth's recycled materials,
for the wheel of the world that never rests:
the igneous birth in the furnace of the rift,
the sedimentary layering of the long descent,
and the metamorphic weight that pulls
the old world back into the new.
For echoing the percussion of volcanic eruptions,
for gold born in a magma furnace and injected 
into hydrothermal veins—

For keeping secrets deep in solution caverns, 
where calcite drips down a slow, stalactite with time. 
For shale holding the liquid memory of the sun and plants 
within its oil, and the silent fire of the geode’s heart.

For marking where glaciers melted, receded, and shed their stony till. 
For erratics, those displaced giants dropped by the ghost of vanishing ice. 
For the ivory-white silence of the North, where gravel mounds 
and frozen silt hold the weight of the mammoth’s grave— 
a heavy reliquary of bone and flint locked in the grip 
of the terminal moraine

For the hunter’s chert to make a sharp edge, 
for anchoring our small and wandering steps. 
and yet—they do not merely hold the past; 
they are the threshold where the living stand. 
In their mineral pulse, we find our own, 
the slow, steady beat of a world that waits 
to turn our dust into a future rock.

By Steven Wade Veatch