Down Hammett Grove Way

Steven K. Mittwed

Across the dense forest floor
an ancient rupture passes,
nearly imperceptibly. 

But trained eyes see evidence 
of past stress and strain in rocks afield,
crushed and smeared by colossal forces,
tell-tale signs of primeval movements.
Rocks and their myriad minerals 
testify to all – 
tacitly, insistently, undeniably. 

Only keen searchers
-those willing 
to slog through streams,
trudge up slopes,
clamber over surrendered trees,
and dodge serpents, briars, 
and the splendid silks of orb-weavers-
can glimpse their hoarded memories.

Indeed, the strata to forces
immense and intense
did once yield, 
first brittly, then plasticly,
transformed as if in a giant mill –
the rocks endure, stately still.

Tending toward quiescent,
Earth rests here.

But plates will once again collide, 
as the inexorable cycle affects
place after place, side to side.

One, then another, yields in the zone,
enjoying the heat and pressure
that transform the rocks – 
pushing, later pulling and collapsing, 
grinding all the while.

Crystallising, shattering, annealing, 
later weathering, then eroding –
awaiting their glorious re-formation… 
in deep time.

The Science

What is now called the central Piedmont shear zone (CPSZ) in the southern Appalachian Mountains, USA, was once thought to be a suture – essentially a complex scar marking the boundary between dissimilar tectonic plates (the North American plate known as Laurentia, and the exotic peri-Gondwanan terranes). Although these dissimilar rocks do come together at the CPSZ, at the surface it is presently a late Palaeozoic (~300 Ma) zone of mainly ductile thrust faults. Thus, rocks of two different terranes indeed touch here, but the actual suture is obscured by burial.

The poem is a reflection on how shear zones like the CPSZ are formed, followed in places by pull-apart and collapse at the end of the last period of mountain building, with the ceaseless operation of the rock cycle. My particular experience is with the rocks in the area between Gaffney and Moore, to the northeast and southwest, respectively, of Pacolet, South Carolina. Hammett Grove is a small neighbourhood north of Pacolet, and hosts fascinating slivers of ophiolitic rocks (pieces of oceanic crust that have been scraped off and pushed up onto a continent during tectonic-plate collision). They are perched atop rocks of the Cat Square terrane, thought to be a remnant basin that developed between Laurentia and the approaching volcanic island arc known as Carolinia.

The Poet

Steven K. Mittwede, PhD, EdS, is a retired Earth Science teacher and active research geologist currently engaged in a variety of academic projects in Upstate South Carolina, all of which are proximal to the central Piedmont shear zone. He has previously published poems written in Turkish, which had a metaphysical thrust.

Next poem: Dreaming Lights amidst the Amyloid Shadows by Vidisha Chadachan