Blue Grass Cave -- A Poem

Blue Grass Cave

By: Lance S. Barron

Ordovician waves pounded shells into sand.

Strophomenids, Rafinesquinas –

Some resupinate; others not.

Laying quiet, squeezed: limestone.

Uplift along the arch: Cincinnati.

Slowly eroding, slowly dissolving,

Younger rocks washed away to sea,

Creating the Blue Grass.

Calcium carbonate in solution.

Carbonic acid in limestone attack,

For eons, ions dissolve away,

Enlarging a small, incipient crack.

Individual holes lined up in passages.

Not tubular, ragged. Fractal.

Not fractured, eroded, corroded,

By the Blue Grass rain.

As a cave, not so much.

Well house over farm sink.

Thesis cave for M.S.

Inner Blue Grass Karst.

Mapping with Silva Ranger.

Wet belly flop: Goes. Small.

Flowstone, fish, fluorite vein.

Has it all: Blue Grass cave.

Knee deep. Knee deep on Who?

That's Whom.

Green leaves in mud on the ceiling.

Roving Blue Grass death storms.

Thirty-foot cable ladder,

On belay: Goldline.

Beer in the cooler up top.

Wouldn't fool an old man,

Would you?

Note: An earlier version of this poem appeared in Illuminations Issue No. 26, June 2017, a publication of the NSS Arts & Letters Section.