A veiled crystal fracture winks
its sudden brightness from the dark earth’s
hot heart, where stones may grow and break.

Arrested fluid fills the cracks,
milky bubbles obscure the
tiny tetrahedral towers soaring without bells
towards a vast empty vault:
spanning, indifferent serenity,
a world, without magic;
subject instead to gravity
against which crystals grow.

Rust weeps its red wounds
into the perishing earth
holding this astonishment:
amethyst, jasper, onyx, rose,
the common simplicity of white pebbles -
not the proof of passing unicorns
they might have been,
but prisms
bungled by intrusions
into iridescent splendour.

And on every wrist
trapped crystal splinters sing,
with ringing precision,
the not-quite eternal songs
of time’s imperfect pulse.