Liber Terrae - Chapter 1

Verses

Verse 96

I split the hill with a hammer and found an ocean where no ocean remained.

Verse 97

The stone kept its shells after the water forgot them.

Verse 98

Therefore do not say the Earth is silent. You have merely learned to hear only voices with lungs.

Verse 99

A mountain is a sentence written slowly enough to outlive the language that names it.

Verse 100

Beneath every city lie other weather, other forests, other bones, and the patient work of pressure.

Verse 101

We built monuments to resist time, then quarried their stone from things time had already defeated.

Verse 102

The ground does not preserve everything. Memory also has erosion.

Verse 103

Yet absence leaves shapes: a vanished root, a dried sea, a species known by one tooth.

Verse 104

I have held a creature three hundred million years dead in my palm and felt no holiness, only scale.

Verse 105

Scale is enough. A thing need not be divine to make you small.

Verse 106

The continents move while kings declare borders permanent.

Verse 107

Every map is drawn on a floor that refuses to stay still.

Verse 108

The Earth raises mountains without ambition and destroys them without anger.

Verse 109

Volcanoes do not punish. Rivers do not forgive. These are human verbs laid upon indifferent motions.

Verse 110

Still, indifference is not emptiness. From chemistry came cells, from cells came hunger, from hunger came eyes.

Verse 111

The first eye opened upon no audience. The world was beautiful before beauty had a witness.

Verse 112

Then witnesses multiplied, ate one another, mated, fled, nested, dreamed, and called the whole arrangement life.

Verse 113

Fossils are not failures. Most successful things eventually become stone or nothing.

Verse 114

If you seek permanence, ask the zircon; if you seek importance, ask the child burying a cat beneath a fig tree.

Verse 115

Both answers are true at different scales.

Verse 116

The crust beneath your feet is recycled graveyard and nursery together.

Verse 117

Soil is rock instructed by weather and enriched by the dead.

Verse 118

Every loaf is geology passing briefly through blood.

Verse 119

Every breath belongs partly to organisms older than any prayer.

Verse 120

I do not worship the Earth. I study her, which has often seemed to me the more demanding reverence.

Verse 121

When my own bones enter the record, let no one call it return. I was never outside the system.