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© 2014 Susan Ioannou Author of the respected guide A Magical Clockwork: The Art of Writing the Poem (Wordwrights Canada), Susan has written a number of poetry collections, including Clarity Between Clouds (Goose Lane Editions), Where the Light Waits (Ekstasis Editions), Coming Home (Leaf Press), Looking Through Stone (Your Scrivener Press), and Looking for Light (forthcoming from Hidden Brook Press), and some of her poems have been set to music for concert performance. Her books of poetry, as well as fiction and nonfiction, are described on her website http://www3.sympatico.ca/susanio/feature.html This poem was published in Looking Through Stone: Poems About the Earth (Your Scrivener Press, 2007).

Mineralogy Lesson

Staring at crystals
this man is a scientist,
and when I murmur of mysteries

"Physics," he grunts.
"Temperature and speed.
That's why a crystal grows, or doesn't."

What a wonder it grows at all!
How hidden under the earth
water, light, and air gather
dendrite on dendrite, facet by facet,
becoming a geometrical bloom,
or soften and redissolve.

He smirks.
"It's ions.
Diffusion."

But I believe:
the inanimate is prickly with soul,
or why do its ions attract, heat rising,
and fasten on others
faster and faster?
Isn't that love?

"It's physics,"
he insists. "Physics."
—unaware he blushes.

                                                                      

 

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