‘Metamorphic Rock’ by Reid McGrath

Pressure is what the loam feels when, buried
and dis-tracted, it cannot function right;
when it cannot get at the rain and light;
when it, by a hellish heat, is harried.
When it is not prepared, or preparing,
To produce, what it was meant to produce;
when its physical makeup is not loose;
when it’s sick and tired of temporizing.
For what it wants is to produce good fruit;
to rise like cream out of that sub-terrain.
But who we are is never absolute;
and via all this pressure and this pain,
solidified like some rare earth-bound loot,
it settles by becoming rock again.

Reid McGrath is a poet living and working in the Hudson Valley.