When did the fires ignite?
When did the patterns first reveal?
Was it when we first stood UPRIGHT,
or used a rock to **** our meal?

When did Man first emerge from prehuman?
When did we first begin to have a care?
Was it when we drew our hand upon the wall
That we first announced we're self-aware?

They started off
As nothing more
Than interstellar dust

And then they pulled together
And shone bright in the void

Then they burst
Into a fiery nebula
Of multielemental radiation and dust

And over and over again
They were made and unmade
Beautiful galaxies shining endlessly
In that silent vacuum

And they formed solarities
And became little blobs of magma and gas
And they spun around
Crashing and breaking
Merging and making

Until one day they cooled
And all was calm over the muddy, uniform
Three foot deep sulfuric waves

And one day
They became a red film
But this time
Instead of being made or unmade
They made and unmade themselves

And as they made themselves again
They missed a thread in the genes
And they changed

And over and over
They made these mistakes
But each error they learned from
Each wrong step made them stronger
Each bad guess made them smarter
Each wrong look made them more beautiful

And so they grew
From a film to a blob
From green string to trunks
From swimming rays to Jurassic terrors
From frightened mice
To graceful, awkward, weird-looking, insane, and genius apes

And the time between changes
Kept getting shorter
First coordinated sounds
Then scratched in clay
Then limestone mountains
And one day
They looked around
And realized they had the planet

And as the billenia of the galaxies
Lapsed into the millions of life
Lapsed into the millennia of the young apes
Lapsed into the centuries of the modern species
Will lapse even further

And they looked all around
And they saw this change

And they imagine
And discover
And create
And live

And one day
They will make for themselves
A pair of metal wings
And a tail of pure energy

And they will fly up
And dance amongst the stars

Imagine the first rumor. The first grunt of gossip
The first finger-point of prejudice. It was probably
like noticing the sunset for the first-time. How it
stretched out across the entire scope of your vision,

peeled back into a city that wasn’t the one you were in,
like an orange peel, one skin at a time. Eventually,
the world rounded, the ice melted, ****-sapiens
grew taller. Our voices deepened, bodies thickened.

We learned to survive the cold, the floods,
the irrational wars, and crescent-mooned nights
underneath tinned roofs. Then came the enlightenment,
the evolution of speech. The first cousin of Germanic

languages; the second cousin of Romantic languages.
And then the first rumor. The first appraisal of good
or bad actions of people hardly known. I imagine
my ancestors, 1.9 million years ago, grunting

with raised brow in her partner’s direction. Pointing
at two men crouching behind a large, fallen boulder.
Pointing at a man who belongs to her neighbor,
crawling out of a cave that doesn’t belong to him.

They are probably turning over in their bone-filled
graves as I think of what to say next, laughing at how
far we haven’t come from the ghouls of gossip,
discussing how out of all the occupations in this world:

bricklayer, lawyer, educator, their descendant chose
this noble profession, this calling up of events.

The quieter he became ...
the more he could feel
only a single lit candle
moved the stillness ,
gripping the void between
lucency and obscure darkness

longing eyes slipped slowly closed
as the flicker faded ,
inner quietude dimming all light
the darker it got ...
the more vividly he could see

a nearly silent exhaled sigh
let the memories flood ;
leaning into the bereft
where there once was light ,
he became a timeless silence
                              without form
                     only shaped by retracing
                        re-remembered words

yearning to understand
some of the greater things life unfolds
experiencing the unknown
                             without fear ,
                      for to clinch and feel
that which seems indefinable

     for here ,
in this formless
manifest dimension ,
all layers of essence
are peeled back
to the bared aurora
of a soul's spirit light ;

at the core of inner stillness
      nothing is impossible ...



© H A Rivers all rights reserved

Let us be like trees in autumn.
Let us turn colors and leave the landscape of this world more beautiful than it was before.
Let others bask in the purity of our evolutionary changing leaves.

May we not be afraid to shed our skin.
May we know that even when we are most barren, like the branches of winter it will not last.

Spring will come again.
It will put bark back on our trunks.
It will feed our roots that we embedded deep within the earth.
It will allow us to bloom again.

Girl walking,
Full sunlight shining,
On the beach,
On her figure
Slightly hidden.

All eyes watching,
As she moves.
All to see
A million years
From the slime of the sea.

We are only human
Built up from the muck
Made of dna
Purpose constructed
From chaos
How we define
What designed us
Time plus adaptation
This ecological manifestation
That feels pain
That feels love
That feels loss
And so much more
Compassion in actions
One person to another
We could not be better
Because we are only
Limited children of the cosmos
Only human
For such a small span
Of time

I used to be white too
until I realized that if I didn’t
reclaim my indigenous
evolutionary potential
I would be doomed