NaPoWriMo Day 3

Day 3 of NaPoWriMo provides the prompt, 'write a sea shanty'. However, the prompts are meant to be pretty flexible which is handy as I have to be honest - I have no feel for sea-shanties, but here’s something I have been working on which has a marine theme of a sort, albeit a very different one…

The Eternal Particle

High basaltic mountain-top,
Ice-melt trickles through a crack,
Refreezes, elbows outwards - thaw-ice-thaw,
Until a tiny fragment splits away and falls,
Now the youngest flake in scree-slope multitude,
Slowly shuffles ‘til a cliff-edge looms,
Tumbling deep into the valley,
Where it’s carried in chill montane rills,
Saltating, towards the ocean,
On the way it spends some time,
As river-bank and sediment,
Silty bed and floodplains broad,
Until a rainstorm lifts it up,
Past meanders, estuary,
And out into the salted sea,
To settle just beyond low tide,
In shallows where it’s then ingested,
Passed through countless worms and other species.

Then, years on, it falls anew,
Spat from a polyp on a ledge,
An outcrop of the continental shelf,
A precipice at the land’s far edge,
So after long millennia,
It passes from the realm of light,
Into an eerie, inky night,
The last weak-blue vestiges of sun,
Replaced by blinking photophores,
Bioluminescent specks,
Glow from hook-fanged fish and firefly squid,
Tentacled coelenterates,
Ciliated swimmers with iridescent shimmers.

On it tumbles with its minute kin,
Settling gently ‘pon the abyssal plain,
Where the tectonic-slow shift starts,
World-plates’ inexorable crawl,
Relentlessly towards subduction ‘neath the crust,
A magma sphere-within-a-sphere,
Churning, roiling, heat and pressure,
Then pushing up through molten rifts,
White-hot chambered laccoliths,
Exploding back into the air,
To rain down ‘mongst the fire and pumice,
Upon another mountain peak,
Part of Earth’s fresh grey ash-coat,
Aeon’s cycle once again re-wrote.