GEOLOGY

by Byron Beynon

The framework of names
connected to a pressure of rocks
dating a countryside

with soft and hard looks,
the sequence of layers
with fern imprints,

an identity brooding with age;
the tribal faces
with Ordovician and Silurian families,

their shadows caught
by the links of territory.
Blue stones sifting

through the mind’s burning frost of evening,
a source where the dark earth
threads silently from

intense foundations,
the marked origins deepening
during the passage of fugitive time.