My Brother Ivan Gave Me a Large Chunk of Petrified (Crystallized) Wood Decades Ago

As eons pass, some things become serene

In death and nearly everlasting in

Their beauty.  Logs condemned to mud come clean

In loveliness.  The minerals that win

Inside their cells replace destruction with

A lustrous presence that no tree could dream,

A petrifying gorgeousness like myth,

A deathless holiness in its extreme.

The chambered nautiloid is pressed beneath

  Photo by Roger Weller

Four hundred million years of saving slime

And is transmogrified within its sheath

To shapeliness of glamor by slow time.

  Who knows what each man’s waiting heart might turn

    To, age preserved, made hard like curving fern?

~ Phillip Whidden