A baby boy shuts his eyes and sees
bull continents drift,
collide, startle, spin around.
Prehistoric bucks suddenly accusing-
(Did YOU just back into ME?)
They jam head-to-head,
gouge, reconcile, then confer.
The boy likes what he sees.
The beasts get down to business.
They iron out earth's future
with special bellows, & lots of musk.
Above this caucus
of nodding, naying heads,
clacking antlers mesh
into a burgeoning thicket.
He calls for more!
The thicket shudders,
sprouts into a dagger forest.
It shoots up recklessly,
like a baby's legs,
and jabs the sky
with young ideas:
New species, struggles, lies.
Whole societies in the air,
too busy to teach their children
about the bellowing below.
The weight of so much life is too much.
There is a final SNAP
of prehistoric backs.
Not a grain remains on which to carve
the memory of all the things
that passed before this boy's eyes.
A friend called it a Darwinian myth. Highest hurdle was anthropomorphizing continents.
