ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Shiyang Su is a Chinese poet and an undergrad at UChicago. Her other poems can be found or are forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, SWWIM, Rattle, Passages North, Diode Poetry Journal, Shō Poetry Journal, Gigantic Sequins, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She was nominated for Best New Poets.
June 12, 2024
Prayer to Deep Time
Stratigraphers are envisaging the relics
of our present in a hundred million years:
There will be a strange paucity of limestone,
some footprints left by exotic plants, the collapsed
mines now channels of brecciated rock.
The earth, birdless and fully marked.
Cities will turn into a stratum floundering
above the seas. Our cars, steel softened
and finally stopped. Sulfides and glass
and traces of bone that say
tender and suffer.
But no attics of books with extinct
words will survive, no hard ashen
snows making love to an oak, or the sense
of time moving through a lover’s hair.
No child's wonder or prayer.
There might as well be no God.
When you died, I sealed your ashes
in a jar and kept walking. Of course
they'd never find you. The oldest ceramic,
made 18,000 years ago, is on the edge
of decay. And my memory, expiring
in decades. But look at the small intimacy
deep time has rendered us —
on its billion-year spectrum,
our first flint falls an inch behind
the invention of rockets.
When I close my eyes,
your death lies right next to mine.
Inspired by Jeremy Davies’s thought experiment in The Birth of the Anthropocene. "Strange paucity of limestone" and "the collapsed mines now channels of brecciated rock" are direct quotes.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
