The reign of the dinosaurs ended in spring
The earth in its youth culled the living
unmolested. Nothing came cannoning
from heaven. Cauldrons lit themselves
and spilled themselves, and the sea,
its litmus restless, bucked only a little more
than caves’ lintels and continents’ shelves.
Whatever worldlings mutation made,
the eons hatched endings: immolation, ice.
Only our latest extinction arrived
from without, a sentence tied to a stone,
an asteroid that blindsided dinosaurs.
As far as we know, scientists say, they died
in a single spring. It will not happen
that way again, the killing done so quickly.
The odds of vanishing in a single season,
some vernal tell still in the bodies of fish,
no-bake fossils, gills full of silt — the odds
that humankind, too, will disappear
like that, with a trace: that impact spherules
will amber mayflies or will bead, becoming
birdshot and felling a robin for the ages
to press, eggshell frescoing her insides
tell-tale blue; the odds that our end
will end as fast — they are vanishingly small.
/ / /
Note: “I borrowed the title of an article from the website Geology Page (2/27/22) for this poem.” — J. Z.