Poet - Susan Ioannou

AQUAMARINE

To mollify sea deities,
ancient lapidaries prescribed
blue amulets carved from aquamarine
whose inner lapping soothed
and as seasoned sailors believed
wore away the dark coast of worry.

Others cast their woes inside the gem,
then soaked it in a little bowl
beneath the waning moon.
Perhaps within a day or two
where crystals cooled and brittled
a six-rayed star would fan and twinkle
love light toward a long marriage,
restore youth, hope, and friends,
or calm a throbbing tooth.

Today Brazilian pegmatites
host the clearest and the bluest,
named (her birthstone) Santa Marias.
A famous one, unearthed in 1910,
was heftier than a bongo drum:
110.5 kilograms
—an amulet with cleansing tears enough
for a thousand sailors
not to drown.

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Poet Susan Ioannou

METAMORPHIC

The Earth is never still.
Even as it crumbles
it is building,
great plates pushing
sediments up from the oceans
or sliding them under the continents.

There massive heat and stress
flatten minerals into bands
or leaf them into layers
or squeeze their particles so tight
atomic patterns rearrange
and recrystallize
limestone roughness into marble, 
sandstone into quartzite,
shale to slate.

Deepest and hottest,
diamonds are hardened.
Higher, beryls and topaz cool.
Like sulphur,
without any air some form
as minerals and bacteria mingle
or, with oxygen, are reborn
like a brassy chalcopyrite
deepened to azurite blue.

Even the oldest,
like a foliated gneiss,
after remelting into magma,
hiss back up volcanic vents
and overflow as mountains
—repeating Earth’s cycle.

Poet Susan Ioannou

SEDIMENTARY ROCK

Near Earth’s surface
whatever the sun
heats and cools,
swells, softens, and shrinks,
is dried out, weakened,
and splits off.

Whatever water and ice pick at
and winds have dropped
weathers into layers,
loose compost, clay, and sand
that grain by grain dissolve
and seep down

and melting into groundwater, form
minerals lustrous as copper
in enrichment zones,
as myriad
as there are organisms
and oxygen in ample supply,
or carbonic acid
for microbes to decay,
as motley as calcium swirled in shells
or skeletons pressed into silica
before sinking back to stone
—lithified.

Poet Susan Ioannou

IGNEOUS ROCK

Five kilometres under the ocean floor
deep in the upper mantle,
red, writhing magma
pushes high through denser rock
and over many thousands of years
cools into feldspar, mica, and quartz.

Or through neighbouring strata
fluids flood scalding chemistries
that over millennia mingle and harden
into more flickering minerals—
chloride, fluoride, sulphur,
silver and gold—

until, in an earthly cycle of desire,
magma rushes upward—again
to be transformed,
for no matter how solid, how old,
igneous means to set on fire,
to burn.

Poet Susan Ioannou

WORKING THE MINES:ENGINEERS

How far mining has come,
from a Stone Age cobblestoned stick
to the drill rig’s 40-kilogram tricone bit,
its bullet-shaped tungsten carbide teeth
ripping straight down through rock
100 rotations per minute;
how far, from bonfires lit overnight
to explosives remotely controlled
blasting whole walls of ore,
too massive for piling into slave’s baskets
but not for a 10-tonne Load-Haul-Dump
12-metre-long steel mucker.

Gold is explored no longer solely
by a lone man scouring a stream
and tilting a simple pan,
nor more subtly by Geiger counter
or a bush plane low overhead
swinging a magnetometer aft.

Even farther above,*
a satellite now probes Earth,
imaging hectares of lonely terrain
and beeping data to a computer
to e-mail prospectors on the ground
co-ordinates where to mallet in stakes.

Far below,
in near darkness,
through GPS-gizmos on shovels and dozers
to surface computers
a satellite diagrams every move,
every hazard throughout the mine,
and fixes precision crosshairs
on where next to trigger
a blast in a seam.
Even the drill bit houses a delicate sensor
tracking each rock, stratum, and ore
it chews a hole through.

Once every drift is emptied,
and all the miners have gone,
a satellite plans and scans through time
the angles, cuts, cleaning, and seeding
for hills, valleys, wetlands, and bush
reclaimed, again to be green.

* The Mining Automation Program in Canada

Poet Susan Ioannou

GEOLOGIST

He bids on the obscure: a speck
inching across kilometres of scrub  
to map and pick samples out of sediments,  
or cragged above evergreens, unseen
balancing a magnetometer
to listen to rocks.

He is a gambler:
under snake bellies,
between goat hooves
he trusts silver and zinc are waiting
and surfaces like scooped cream
sprout opals,
or powdered from sunshine are sulphur,
or gritty with Mediterranean blue
hold copper.

Also, he is wary: what glitters
may be the dream
—of fools.
Grade must be tested.
What grams to the tonne?
Where too angled, too deep?

A gambler bets
against absolutes.
How much should he dare
to open the Earth
to pick at her secrets
hundreds of metres down?