Voice of the Whirlwind

 “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind” – Job 38:1

Who is this that disturbs creation? 

Who cracks the bonds of matter 

    and classifies the rubble? 

Who samples the dust in the deserts of Mars 

    and light from the edges of time? 

Who reconstructs the eons of Earth 

    and numbers its mass extinctions? 

What kind of creature could tinker with cells 

    and play with the blueprints of life?

You who’d grasp the tragic fate 

    to recreate the world, gird your soul 

to grapple with angels and demons inside 

    while I test your pride with questions. 

Where were you when I lit the stars 

    and forged primordial galaxies? 

Were you there when I molded the sun 

    and chiseled the moon from molten Earth? 

Tell me how you trapped the gas 

    and tamed the Hadean greenhouse. 

Did you summon the mile-high glaciers 

    and guide the conveyer of continents? 

Could you construct a living cell 

    and craft new kingdoms of life? 

Then engineer an Eden 

    to nurse emerging souls? 

So you’ve mastered the tools of logic, 

    teased truths from tangles of facts, 

captured the core of koans 

    and woken new worlds within.

Can you follow the heart of compassion? 

    Are you able at last to manage your soul? 

To bear the eye of awareness 

    and share the tumult of time with me? 

Across the long ages, I am 

    calling you out of your childhood.

Will you grow beyond your grasping 

    and nurture the world with me? 

Will you one day call me ‘companion’?

By Michal Maňas - Own work, CC BY 2.5, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=647900

The Prophecy of Rocks

The rocks below you cry aloud …

The solid ground you stand on floats.
Foundations of your cities shift.
Beneath the crust the mantle stirs,

a seething churn of mineral stew
tracing circuits, trench to core
and back again to seafloor ridge

extruding mass from ocean vents,
paving plates with new basalt.
You ride on granite arks

above a superheated sea of ore.
As Earth rocks quarter billion year beats
continents glide around the globe

on an endless crustal contra dance.
Laurentia, Baltica, Siberia, Australia
diverge, divide, converge, collide

and cluster together again and again.
Nuna, Rodinia, Gondwana, Pangaea –
supercontinents always split.

Oceans are puddles that open before us.
We’ll bridge the Pacific inch by inch,
lurching west through quakes and jolts

that topple your ruins, shred the remains,
and bury the bones of your species’
descent beneath a supercontinent –

Amasia looms a beat ahead.
Earth rocks quarter billion year beats.
Foundations shift beneath your feet.

… and mock your brief dominion.

Supercontinent Amasia in 250 million years