This is a layered landscape,
Scarred
And heaved wide open to reveal
Its inmost part,
The cumulative quick of its
Recording heart.

Tumultuous and barren,
It lies hacked
Or hollowed; age on age,
Its history stacked
In horizontal bands of grey and ochre,
Cracked

By deep descending fissures
Reaching down
Into the lightless crunch of dense
Compacted stone,
The graveyard of lost continents
Remade as one.

Here, ferns and forests, and inhabitants of oceans,
Dumb and blind,
Have found themselves unstrung, and slowly
Redefined
As grit beneath the fingertips.
Through time,

the dust of distant planets
Knits in scars
With all the creeping, quivering things
That seed and spark
And tremble on the edge of life like the
Remotest stars.