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Manganese
Opposite Iron you support enzymes,
Though with oxygen and carbon you're wont to combine.
In X, alpha, beta, and gamma phases you're found,
In nodules underwater, or deep underground.
In use since the days of Pliny the Younger,
You support human life and for you we hunger.
You also make possible battery dry cells,
And alter the color of glass that we sell.
In addition you're invaluable in metallic technology,
By hardening steel you increase its quality.
Hence you support the driver and help build the car,
Manganese I wish more knew how helpful you are!
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By William Engram |
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COUNT UP
MANGANESE
MAGNIFICENCE
Put the pinkish tinge on this brittle metal;
numerous minerals contain this element;
it's used in steel, batteries, and ceramics.
APPLYING UNIQUE PROPERTIES
Specially treated manganese is magnetic;
certain railroad tracks point toward North;
individually effective vitamins aim South.
MANAGING MANGANESE NICELY
Extraordinary chemical reactions do occur;
the abundant ores separate into pure metal
as powdered aluminum and heat get added.
COUNTING OUT A MELTING POINT
Seeing four allotropic forms of manganese,
your alpha form's stable, your gamma form,
soft, flexible, & easily cut, changes to alpha.
ALTERING MANGANESE MODULES
Your omnipresent omega can encompass all;
arriving on time, at the alluvial delta smelters,
the world of mass reacting to energy prevails.
IGNITING A COSMIC LOVE FURNACE
Your specific gravity of possibility is reached;
gaining your strength highly resistant to wear,
this thing's stiff competition in a tough market.
CALCULATING MANGANESE PROFIT
Raise the important alloying agent to sublime;
realize a ridiculous is, but, a small step behind,
providing goods and services to avoid that fall.
FIGURING OUT A PROPER BALANCE
Set up manganese oxide dry cell depolarizers;
shake up decolorizing agents for glass making;
send up a fair flare for just knowing something.
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By Will Smart |
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MANGANESE
The Dream of the Nodules
My hand was still small, so it looked large:
a manganese nodule,
dredged from the ocean floor. Roughly round, textured like a
black orange, a coaly fruit. I didn’t understand when my father, grinning, shucking off his overcoat, said,
“There’s money down there.”
Manganese is an element to be reckoned with.
Its nodules crystallize around a tiny sea worm –
such an unlikely heart! - then build themselves
from slow layers of salts and currents.
Manganese dances in our bloodstreams, polishing skin smooth, drumming out heartbeats.
Too much makes a crazy poison sometimes
in the veins of welders and dyers. It burns blue
in a blast furnace,
makes steel harder. Amethysts are purple because.
Its batteries glow the world. It makes alloys.
It makes profits.
My father said there was to be a giant ship built to mine the nodules.
It would set sail, smoke from the stacks staining sunrises and -sets, and stay at sea
for months, searching, stirring those deep, hidden beds.
Winches would lower great rakes to scar the seafloor,
drop deepwater nets to pull it all to the surface: eels, seals, blues, squid, tons of sludge,
and mixed into the chaos, those calm balls of ore.
The plan was predictably as ruthless, as presumptuous, as all mining is:
Expecting the earth to yield to human wiles. Expecting to own the unownable.
But the plan didn’t reckon the nodules.
Not that they knew anything,
nor made any plans to save themselves.
They only rested in the icy current, bobbing and nodding, blooming slowly in their dark fields,
safe in their own purity.
They trusted each other, shifted and sighed in their sleeping, dreaming of the weight of water, of the beautiful undersides of fish.
They prayed in their stony way as all inanimates pray, their very existence a right, a certainty, a thankfulness.
The ship was never built.
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By Jennifer Leto Revill |
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Manganese, thou art an element of doom
Oh, manganese, manganese, Element of doom.
Your 58 atoms, Fill me with gloom.
I do the experiments, South of the border,
But I can’t understand, Your magnetic disorder.
I may struggle and struggle, to the end of my days,
But I won’t understand, your beta-phase.
Oh, manganese, manganese,
You know that it’s true,
I am twice as frustrated as you. |
By Congy Ben |
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