Telluria
Like a seam in the metamorphic
fold, in mica’s gleam and shale
split clean by time
the mountain writes its histories.
Go to the faultline’s
cooled tongue of basalt.
Through uplift and subduction—
pressure, through eons
ground to grain,
the stone speaks.
Like the rare breath caught
in kelp-thick brine
the seabed hums
through teeth of coral, through
mollusk-shell shards and
driftwood sunk with salt.
Through the slow melt, through
silt’s forgetting, through
ten thousand tides,
the ocean remembers.
© Rowan Tate
Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative (poet, essayist, visual artist, songwriter). Her work proves the interplay of fragility and endurance in processes of ecological change, decay, human migration, and memory.
The Loch Raven Review 