Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Geosonnet 55


A plotter’s pause to synchronize his watch
Is often preparation for a heist:
A bank vault? Tardy mail train full of scotch?
A drug syndicate’s freighter full of ice?
Geologists scheme on a grander scale
Where ice envelops Earth, a mile thick.
Should cryospheric pilfering prevail
The melting must be synchronous, and quick.
Boron reveals (in sonnet twenty five)
Cap carbonates have one last common flaw
A rapid deposition crooks derive
A catastrophic warming's last hurrah
   The zircons say less than a million years.
   CO2 melts the ice, then disappears.


Other geosonnets: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Thursday, May 16, 2019

Geosonnet 54


A horoscope yon wand’ring planets make
Predictions of our facies, lives, and death.
Is graveyard orbital influence fake?
A sediment’ry burial shibboleth?
Milanković, that fortune-telling Serb
Used planet motions to predict the ice
Can continental weathering perturb
A fossilizing chemical device?
The Ordovician pyritized remains
Of soft parts every point one million years
Suggest orbit obliquity explains
Whether flesh is preserved or disappears..
   A fool’s gold coin beneath a dead worm’s tongue
   Exquisite fossil afterlife’s begun.




Other geosonnets: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 

60 61 62 63 64  65 66