Erosion Questions

Devonian fossils from the Rockford Fossil Bed

This week geologists came to talk about the Decorah Impact Crater, which got me thinking about change on a geologic timeframe.

This poem was inspired by Amy Ludwig VanDerWater’s, Poems are Teachers, “Try on a Pattern from Nature” p. 117. In this case, the pattern is the big time-frame pattern of geologic time: Create. Destroy. Create. One of my goals is to use April Poetry Month to explore this terrific resource.

Erosion Questions

he said the meteorite struck during the Mid-Ordovician,
right where we stand now; that
the crater filled with water and
became a brackish pond, or even part of a shallow sea, that
over time it filled with mud; that
it teemed with life, that this mud turned to shale, which then
eroded off the rest of the landscape except
for the crater because something that is already missing
cannot go away; he said that
the fine sediments preserved even soft-bodied creatures well enough that
they could even be named; that
he has examined only one cubic meter of shale; that
95% of the species in the shale no one had ever seen before; that
without this crater an entire world of creatures
would have been lost to time; and
I wonder: what of these lost worlds, and
what of ours, and
why does this make my heart ache so?

– Steve Peterson

Published by

Steve Peterson

I teach fifth grade in Iowa.

2 thoughts on “Erosion Questions”

  1. But maybe in the big scheme of things, in the geologic time scale of things, we shouldn’t be sad. We humans, with our cognitive ability to understand our planet and its vast history, are perhaps no more or less than the organisms in that shale. (Except maybe the Pentecopterus decorahensis…I want a poem from the POV of a 6-foot scorpion-like predator!!) Are we the cause in the demise of our planet, or are we the effect of some bigger event on some bigger scale that we can’t even imagine? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that wondering this give us permission to wreck the planet. But it does make my head spin when I think about how insignificant I really am in the big scheme of things…

  2. This makes me think about so many things as I waver between heartbrokenness and awe. How much we know; how much we don’t. How much we can do; how much we cannot. How big and how small we are.

    Thank you, Steve, for sharing my book in your posts. I am humbled and honored and hope you find it useful. I am going to catch up over these next days. Peace.

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