HOW TO MAKE SAND

Issue SixIssue Six PoetryPoetry

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By Natalie D-Napoleon

 

First, a star must be formed;

bodies colliding into hot bodies

 

through infinite time and space

destroying one story, creating another,

 

molten ball of fire and gas

time upon time, and when that fire dies out,

 

or retreats deep into the core

Earth, the planet, and earth, the terra, is made.

 

Then, take a rock or a mountain or a hill wear it down, wear it down.

 

Rocks broken back and forth through time;

epiclastic: storms, water, wind,

 

the moon’s pull, the tides,

clocks that curl under the earth’s beach;

 

shaping, until it is between two millimetres

and a sweet sixteenth of a millimetre, not so

 

round or perfect or thin.

Silica and quartz, gypsum, coral

 

and shell, obsidian grains, deep olivine –

zircon, 4.4 billion years old,

 

found int he Jack Hills of Western Australia,

on earth for 98 per cent of its existence,

 

and still you call this a new land.