Fragile Oddity

They hurtled
through the icy silence
of space
from fragile constellations:
sharp, hard, alien.
To them
their shattering
must be like yesterday;
to us it is the culmination
of millennia,
a joining of star-dots,
when a rock
cracks
and we discover a xenolith
within.

Kim M. Russell, 7^th September 2026

This Monday at the dVerse Poets Pub we area writing quadrilles with Melissa, who says that X marks the spot.

Today our petite poems of exactly 44 words must include a word provided by your dVerse host, and today, that word begins with X, the first-ever quadrille word beginning with x: xenolith, a fragment of foreign rock trapped inside a larger igneous rock.

Melissa tells us more about the word and even provides a list of words that semi-rhyme with xenolith. She has also shared excerpts from poems that include the word.