Quill & Parchment: Amending John Donne's Geology

Amending John Donne's Geology
by Richard Fein

No man is an island entire of itself. I’m a peninsula.
Dark waters completely surround me, almost.
An isthmus is my umbilical cord to Gaia,
a tenacious tie to the continent, a spit of land spiting my solitude.
Storms have blown and tidal waves have surged their strongest
but any clod diminished from the continent settles on my beach.
And if wind and tide reverse
then I in turn am diminished by the smallest sod
which becomes sediment on Gaia’s sand.
And so the two of us converge,
our shorelines forever linked by the alluvium shifting between us.
We’re lopsided twins grounded by the same soil.
And across that earthen bridge there is always traffic,
some coming, some going, some wanted, some not.
No man is a peninsula entire of himself
for so many of us protrude from the continent
like the stray frayed hairs of a shaggy dog.

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