Looking Through Stone – Poems About the Earth – by Susan Ioannou

Poet - Susan IoannouTwo Excerpts from Susan Ioannou’s book of poetry Looking Through Stone – Poems About the Earth. If you would like to order Susan Ioannou’s book of poetry, go to Your Scrivener Press

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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Looking Through Stone – Poems About the Earth – by Susan Ioannou

Excerpt from Susan Ioannou’s book of poetry Looking Through Stone – Poems About the Earth. If you would like to order Susan Ioannou’s book of poetry, go to Your Scrivener Press METAMORPHIC The Earth is never still. Even as it crumbles it is building, great plates pushing sediments up from the oceans or sliding them …

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Looking Through Stone – Poems About the Earth – by Susan Ioannou

Excerpt from Susan Ioannou’s book of poetry Looking Through Stone – Poems About the Earth. If you would like to order Susan Ioannou’s book of poetry, go to Your Scrivener Press IGNEOUS ROCK Five kilometres under the ocean floor deep in the upper mantle, red, writhing magma pushes high through denser rock and over many …

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Looking Through Stone: Poems about the Earth – by Susan Ioannou

Excerpt from Susan Ioannou’s book of poetry Looking Through Stone – Poems About the Earth. If you would like to order Susan Ioannou’s book of poetry, go to Your Scrivener Press 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 …

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