Today’s poem is from Law & Impulse: maths & chemistry poems, published by The Poets Union.

Gerry Jacobson

Geotanka

walking past
a pile of rocks glinting
in morning sunlight
only I know it’s calc-silicate
hornfels of Ordovician age

dark hidden
outcrop by the lake –
Silurian limestone –
lingering remnant
of the Limestone Plains

imprint
of brachiopods
in the mudstone
under our house
an ancient seabed

Monga
rainforest gully –
plumwood trees
growing out of treeferns –
remnant of Gondwanaland

landscape eroded
down for twenty million years …
tired rivers
in their valleys … Woden
Molonglo … Murrumbidgee

Lake George –
basin since the Miocene –
is that
eight million years
since time began here?

moonwashed night
on a dry lake bed
looking
to distant hills
sense of the eternal