'The subduction of Laurentia by Avalonia':
a geological allegory – the nymphs among the stones –
or Aesop's fable for our Young Earth brethren.

Archbishop Ussher and his creationism, how are you –
sophistry, sir, the fossils placed ready-made
in the earth the better to test our faith!

I make but a poor iconoclast, chipping away with
a pocket hammer on the storm beach of the Word,
but in the decay sequence of uranium atoms

I find an Ireland radioactive with promise
and threat: a quaking sod, a clock whose counting
down to zero no clockmaker set. In the name

of the god of deep time and Ireland's short
tradition of nationhood I annotate dark
visions of her unification half a billion years since

for the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, and not
a Kaiser's rifle or teapot armoured car in sight.
Laid down amid impossible magma plumes

and ramparts of volcanic isles the Paleozoic schists
and quartzite of Bray Head, the Himalayan
igneous basalts of Connemara, brew

like heat blisters where one floating continent
smashes against another. Ah, long perspectives!
– yet when all that unpleasantness went off

over the river in Trinity Term, tufts of flame
visible above Front Square, a rifle-crack brought
a tray of petrography slides down on my head:

chips and splinters of old landslips on the move,
snagged in my hair, the old earth under my feet
in an unseemly hurry all over again.

David Wheatley's The President of Planet Earth will be published by Carcanet in 2017