Adamant
The stubbornest of adamant can crack
and even shatter. Adamant can melt.
It can be dynamited, laser-cut.
Once wind and water carve a single rut,
a slab of adamant has to dissolve.
No alchemy can ever bring it back
to what it was before an ibex knelt
to drink out of a pool of recent rain
a ledge of adamant collected in
a shallow bowl. Besides, the worlds revolve
for only so long. Then their stars begin
to swallow them, and adamant, like all
the other matter, turns to cloud again
like mist that curls around a garden wall.
Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/
Amethyst Review 