[Two for the price of one; see note.]
I live on an ancient shield volcano
deemed extinct, honeycombed
by the Northern Rivers.
In its old basement
during explosive phases,
or when magma moved
through central vents,
shales and sandstones
were ripped away –
to be preserved as xenoliths,
inside the cooling igneous matrix.
***
The rising hot basaltic magma
absorbed, by assimilation,
pieces of continental crust:
xenocrysts (mainly feldspar).
We find feldspar bits
along roads, in creeks ...
Once I drew a crystal being
with wild orange hair
who came to me asking.
He said his name was Feldspar.
Wollumbin, aka Mt Warning (public domain).
The channelled drawing mentioned in the poem
© Rosemary Nissen-Wade 1998:
Written for dVerse Quadrille 255: 44 words excluding title and including the word xenolith. A xenolith is a fragment of foreign rock trapped inside a larger, igneous rock. I couldn't resist writing a second quadrille, as second stanza, to include the word xenocryst, an individual foreign crystal similarly trapped.
It's partly a found poem, in that many of the words and phrases are used verbatim from a Google search about this area. These geological terms turned out to be so musical, I couldn't resist including them!