This week’s Poetry Friday segment comes to us from Wayne Ranney, geologist, author and interpretive guide on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. For years, he’s read poetry to his passengers in special places along the river. Blacktail Canyon is one of those places. It’s also where – long ago – a passenger handed him a poem she had written, inspired by one of the most mind-blowing geological formations in the Canyon. Wayne shares that poem with us today…it’s called 'The Great Unconformity', by Charlotte Graham-Clark.
Wayne Ranney:
When I go as a geologist on my river trips, I read a poem to people when we stop at a side canyon called Blacktail Canyon. I read this poem on every single river trip, and it never ceases to bring awe to people when they hear it. Blacktail Canyon is a good place to read it, but the story about the poem is interesting, as well because I had done this on one river trip, and a woman came up to me later that night and handed me this poem, which she called "The Great Unconformity".
So, the reason that this poem is so special to be read at Blacktail Canyon is because for dozens of miles upstream from here I have pointed out the Great Unconformity, a thousand feet above peoples' heads, where these two layers of rock touch each other in the thinness of a sheet of paper, but they represent 1.2 billion years of the rock record that's missing. So, by the time we get to Blacktail, this specific horizon in the rocks has come down to river-level, and people actually get to stop and touch the Great Unconformity. And being the geologist that I am, I always pump them up for how special it is to tell this story at that place.
The Great Unconformity, by Charlotte Graham-Clark
It is time
Touch it
Trail your fingers over a billion years
Etched in the red rock
There is no monument, no temple more sacred
Than this monumental temple to the whole wide world
Seared this great chasm of whispering, eroded eons
With majesty beyond comprehension
And the tender intimacy of glowing sunlight and splashing waters
Stand here on the riverbank awhile and drink
Let the peace of this wild place wash the dirt from your soul
Leave you clean and empty and new
See the light play here over bench and spire
Gold, tan, red, buff, gray
Hear the music of the free water
Green, brown, white, splash, glitter
A new note every day in the symphony of the universe
The sun sets and you see there are two rivers
One beside you
And one above you
And as you watch the stars wheel slowly through the dark sky
The silent sandstones leaning over you reveal this grand secret:
You are part of it, and it a part of you
The past is forever and unchanging
But the present moves through it as it will
The sky reflects it all and gives it back
As the waters that divided these vistas flow through you
You were the rock
You will be the sand on the riverbank
And the life that is in you
Will pass through you
From the quiet layers of the past into the uncharted and free-flowing future
Giving life ever downstream
In God’s good time
Poetry Friday is produced by KNAU's Gillian Ferris. If you have an idea for a story segment, drop her an email at Gillian.Ferris@nau.edu.
