Earth
A Narrative in Verse
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Jurassic
Foundered stone wrecks on Earth’s core
One thousand seven hundred miles
Below the continental crust
Released two slender snakelike plumes,
Thin undulating threads that rose
Through incandescent depths.
The first beneath a vanished spot
Between
The next beneath south
Pushed up against the lithosphere
Until with deafening reports
They cracked the carapace.
Deep radiating fractures fed
Basaltic magmas to the crust
To crystallize as dykes and sills
And broad pahoehoe lava floods,
Engulfing landscapes in black blankets
Oozing orange blood.
Bright fire fountains lit the sky
Above erupting fissure vents,
Threw spinning bombs and sprays that fell
As fiery hail or Pele’s hair;
Hornitos spattered viscous melt,
Exhaling poison gas.
Chlorine, fluorine, sulphur fumes
Formed aerosols and acid rain
Obscured the Sun for months on end
Despoiled forests, lakes and streams
As Death with careless nonchalance
Dealt Earth a glancing blow.
Within six hundred thousand years,
However, skies had cleared and Earth
Enjoyed a climate graced with mild
Conditions reaching latitudes
As high as sixty north and south;
No ice sheets capped the poles.
Pangaea knelt to greet the sea,
Rift valleys concentrating brine
Reflected sun from sparkling salt,
The
To meet a sea of windblown sand
Encroaching from the south.
It was the Age of Dinosaurs;
When giant rept
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Book Details
About the Book
From the formation of the solar system, 4.6 billion years ago, to the fate of the Sun as a fading white dwarf, six billion years from today, Earth: A Narrative in Verse recounts the epic of Earth’s evolution in 44 cantos that document the struggle of irrepressible Life with inevitable Death. Astronomy, geology and biology are melded in poems that employ and celebrate the sounds and symbols of science to describe the formation of planets, tectonic motions, climate change, catastrophic happenings, and the odyssey of terrestrial Life from single cells to complex organisms and finally back to single cells, the last earthlings. Sobering yet uplifting, the work presents Earth in the context of universal time and space.
About the Author
John Dickey has enjoyed Earth and planetary science and poetry since his youth. His career as a scientist extended from vertebrate paleontology in the badlands of