Poetry Year September 22nd

Mechanical the movement
the ancient watch would tick the epochs,
from warmth of foaming seas,
to expansion of the air.

Breath, it is not time to breathe.
Poison, is the breathing.

Then the ages of chalk,
leave behind their shells,
the hunters of burgess,
with their peculiar tells.
The extinction that shocked,
a globe still salted in chiton.

The land was howling blight and winds,
poor moss clung to the aged rocks.
Atomic hours measured by radioactive tocks.
Half and half again.
Half and half again.

Lumbered the swamps
to the era of coal,
ferns frozen to heat,
lands buried whole.

The cold blooded buzzing
gave way to fleet footed aves.

But then and then a fire from nigh
farther than the edge of night,
jet spiral spark streaked across the aging sky.
And winter came that stood a thousand years.

From the desolation of that age of dark,
came small shards of hope,
that wove their rises between the sheets of ice.

This comes to us a billion years a billion more
a billion thrice and almost
a billion again.
That fire would be snuffed out a dozen times
yet relight.

Life will endure,
and between the cracks of our ruined monuments,
will cling the fruits of the next page
of the calendar of life.

The world, and life upon it will ride
past the suffocation, of our carbon tide.