Jewelers, in goggles and buttercup hard hats, chip out a cameo of dinosaur bones - vertebrae necklaces, pelvic abstracts, a baby stegosaurus skull like a Disney dragon. The entire mountain's flank is chiseled out, a bas-relief of rainy-day deaths on a sandbar long before the bingo card of our genes filled up. Big in the hips herself, it's not surprising that earth would remember these. But like a sentimental woman who hoards old dance cards and ribbons from corsages, she'll keep a feather or the baby starfish of a waterbird's footprint one hundred fifty million years. As I have treasured the whorls of my son's day-old toes, printed on his birth certificate, so she preserved four million years two journeys taken on the same day at Laetoli - the long scratch of a millipede's furrow in the dust and a human romp of family footprints, as they passed in the ashes. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...CONTRA MORTEM: THE WOMAN'S GENITALS by HAYDEN CARRUTH WISDOM COMETH WITH THE YEARS by COUNTEE CULLEN IT JUST SO HAPPENS by JAMES GALVIN ARMOR by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM by AMY LOWELL DISMAL MOMENT PASSING by CLARENCE MAJOR MOTHER JUNKIE by CLARENCE MAJOR |