What has borne up so long

Here's a poem by my poet friend  Maryann Corbett:

Magnification

 

 

Colors come as a shock.

Pink garnet, hematite, green epidote.

Agate, the jewels’ blood.

What’s underfoot

is gemstone, not dumb rock,

 

and what we took for dun-

dusted utility—construction grade,

anonymous as mud—

is scaled-down jade.

Like reliquary stone,

 

it venerates remains:

foraminifera in starch-stiff curls,

puff-bodied, spiculed rays,

whorled shells.

Silly to call them grains

 

as if a summer acre

busheled them, cut and dried, the season’s yield.

These need the ocean’s pace—

decades laid down like nacre,

time pearled.

 

Drawn to this intimate view,

we’re pressed to think in eons: glacial crush

that ground scree and moraine,

and river rush

boiling the stone stew

 

down to a settled thing.

So brokenness, shivered from what it was,

reduced again, again,

till it seemed to us

not worth our focusing,

 

falls into focus, strong,

million-powered beneath the microscope.

A child with a paper cup

builds on the sand. What has borne up so long

will bear her up.