The fossils hold no names,
no mourners to cradle their edges,
no elegies to weave their flight into memory.
And yet, they linger,
etched stubbornly into the earth’s spine,
defiant in their refusal to disappear.

The soil sings softly for them to yield,
to smooth their edges,
to fold into the quiet churn of becoming.
But they cling—
not to life,
but to the shape of it,
the weight of what they once were
locked in stone that pretends
it is still bone.

I press my hand to the ground,
feel the echo of their resistance,
and I know them,
for I too am a creature
carrying what time has asked me to release.
I too grip the brittle edges
of what is no longer,
keeping its form
even as it threatens to break me.

We are kin in this rebellion,
this quiet mutiny against forgetting.
Not because the world remembers us,
but because we remember it—
the curve of what was,
the ache of its passing,
the shape of a weight
that cannot be returned.


                     Not alive.


           Not gone.

                                    Only refusing to let go.