Ponyville & Other Poems

by AugieDog

26 - Subduction Zone (free verse)

Pay attention,
And each step you take
Will sink your hoof
Into ages long forgotten.

Time means nothing to a rock
When it's dancing,
And rocks are always dancing,
Sliding from a fiery birth
Through a cold and quiet life
To a death that isn't a death
Anymore than their life
Is really a life
Or their birth
Is really a birth.

Rocks aren't alive.
That's the first thing you learn about them
When you study them.
But the youngest of them
Is still very, very old.

The elements that make up a rock
First formed inside a star
So far away from here and now
That even its light had scattered
Into the cosmic background
Before Princess Celestia
Ever sank a hoof
Into the soil of Equestria.

The elements that make up a rock
Spun and churned through
The infinite blackness of space
Until the gravity of our star's formation
Lassoed them and pulled them in,
Corralled them and forced them together
Deep beneath the surface
Of this planet we call Equestria.

The elements that make up a rock
Get very, very hot when this happens.
And when they're hot and spinning,
Churning and dancing,
It's hard to contain rocks.
They come sliding up
Through vents below the sea
Or bursting up
Through volcanoes
Dotted all across
The surface of Equestria.

And when the elements that make up a rock
Come squishing or tumbling
Out into cooling water or air,
They sigh and settle,
Cuddle close and sleep
And turn into a rock,
That rock right there,
The one you set your hoof next to
When you took that step.

More rocks came up behind it
And pushed it along slowly,
Slowly, oh, so slowly
Until eventually and inevitably,
That rock will drift and dance
Into another crack in Equestria's crust
And get pulled back down
Into the magma
Where it'll stir and crunch,
Waken and crack,
And boil away into its raw elements again.

This'll go on and on like this,
Rocks coming out and going in,
Age upon age upon age,
While ponies step between them
And look at them
And think about them
For as long as Princess Luna
Doesn't let Equestria get hit by a passing comet
Or Princess Celestia
Doesn't let Equestria get subsumed
As the sun moves steadily along the path
Toward becoming a red giant.

And how likely is either of those things?

Author's Note:

My apologies:

To Titanium Dragon. He gave me his gracious permission to write a sort of "free verse glosa" based on four lines from his wonderful "Collected Poems of Maud Pie," but I couldn't get the dang thing to work. So I went with plain ol' regular free verse here.

Mike

Comments

[Ardashir]

5411384 Good to hear! If an when you do something in the vein of 'the Northern thing', I know I'd love to read it.

5411354 Very interesting. I haven't really ever read any Classical poetry beyond prose versions of the Aeneid, Odyssey and Iliad. I may have to check the local libraries to see if they have any collections that aren't in microscopically-small print.

[Soge]

Good as a standalone poem, but great in the context of Titanium's story.

By the way, how different is your creative process when writing free for, compared to writing with a strict metric?

[sopchoppy]

Yay, Maud Poem :)

[AugieDog]

5447243
5534680

Thanks, folks:

I find free verse incredibly difficult to do. To me, poetry is all about the meter and rhymes, so to try and do something that hasn't got either of those and is still a poem just strikes me as odd. This was my third complete start-over-from-scratch attempt at writing something for Maud, and while I'm happy enough with it, I'm going back to limericks for the next one!

Mike

[PresentPerfect]

Yeah, I kinda figured it was Maud. :)