What Are Rocks For?

A Liturgy of Deep Time

For being older than memory or myth.
For giving up a hidden history, layer upon layer.
For recording the silent closing of a vanished sea.
For marking the unconformity of time itself.
 
For the slow-moving magma that cooled miles beneath the surface,
forming the crystalline foundation of continents.
For bearing the stress of mountain building,
and teaching the craton[1] how to endure.
 
Exposed, rocks stand against relentless weather,
yielding only to the slow insistence of wind, rain, and ice,
and then erosion claims the rock rubble.
 
For the igneous birth in the furnace of the rift.
For sedimentary strata laid down in silence.
For the metamorphic weight that pressures and heats
old rock until it forgets what it was.
 
For echoing the violence of volcanic eruptions.
For gold that rose with superheated water and hid itself in veins of ore.
For hosting the silent, reflective fire of the geode’s heart.
 
For keeping secrets deep in solution caverns,
where calcite drips down stalactites slowly over centuries.
For holding the liquid memory of the sun and ancient plants
within the oil locked in shale.
 
For marking where glaciers melted and shed their stony drift.
For erratics—those displaced giant boulders dropped by vanishing ice.
For the frozen silt and sand that holds the weight of the mammoth’s grave.
For the hunter’s chert to make a sharp edge.

For anchoring our small and wandering steps
on a ground that was here before us,
that will be here long after —
indifferent, patient,
still becoming.
 

By Steven Wade Veatch

                        

What rocks are for. Image generated by S. W. Veatch using ChatGPT.

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[1] A craton is an ancient, stable part of the Earth's continental crust that has survived tectonic plate activity and mountain-building processes for billions of years.

Message in Stone

 By Steven Wade Veatch

Those who are gone once came to this sacred place
of remote canyon walls filled with quiet grace.
They made circles of stones to pray and to fast,
to seek a vision for guidance and join with the past.

Here, seekers waited for their spirit guide to appear
who came in many forms to give strength and end fear.
The seekers knew this place where others once prayed
and had visions of power as long as they stayed.

They left sacred images to last on cosmic red rocks:
Dancers, flute players, lizards, and birds left as pecked pocks.
An eternal art on canyon walls of symbols, visions, and more 
Left behind from those who came here before.

Now the clouds grow dark and are messengers of rain,
they bring a breeze scented with sage over the terrain.
An eagle soars as a guardian spirit above the canyon below
over the messages in stone only the ancients truly know.

Garden Park Bone Beds

Near Cañon City, Colorado

Art by AI.

The sun burns in a blue, cloudless sky over bone beds.

Everything is quiet in the heat of Garden Park. A coyote darts by,
following a scent like a moth to light.

Dinosaurs once roamed here in ancient marshlands. 
In Late Jurassic times, a long-necked Camarasaurus and Diplodocus
reached up high in trees for sweet Mesozoic greenery to eat.
A Stegosaurus tried to move, mired in mud; 
a Ceratosaurus looked at her nested eggs and sniffed the humid air.

Fossil hunters and scientists have dug here since 1877, 
among the hills and cliffs along the Fourmile Creek Canyon.
Cope and Marsh1 staged part of their Bone Wars here, 
where their rivalry played out at a heated pace. 

Today, picks strike rock layers and shovels dig down through deep time
into thick Morrison mudstone to where buried bones of dinosaurs rested for millions of years.
Brushes clean, sifters shake, measurements and photos taken, and flies swatted—
a tooth of the ferocious Allosaurus pops up, then fossils of turtles and crocodiles. 
More bones, and then a flurry of discovery, wonder, and excitement. 

While standing on the brink of time, I peer into the past and learn
some secrets of Earth’s ancient times.
As the sun dips down, the day’s digging ends. 
While listening to the twilight, I let the milkweed fall 
from my hand to follow the breeze. 

Watching the evening end and the wind tease the tips of grass,
I think about these fossils and wonder what creatures, 
in a distant future, will look at our fossil remains. 
What will they make of us?

By Steven Wade Veatch
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1 Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, were preeminent paleontologists who battled each other for dominance in the world of 19th century paleontology.