The Earth spends hundreds of millions of years
to bury the little dead anthropod deep in its bosom.
Seas come and leave sediments above its place
of slow transformation into minerals, glaciers scrape
and grind away much of entire ages atop its tomb,
dropping gravel and rocks in their retreat to shape
the trilobite's great mausoleum. Tundra turns to taiga
gives way to plains and forests, and humans come
to under outcrops, breaking rocks, chipping for tools
as millennia fly past, until explosions blast apart
cliffs, force a path on iron and steel for monsters
size unseen since the asteroid hit, for a brief
reign of steam. In the silence of their extinction
comes hammer and chisel in the hands of people
breaking and chipping rocks again, digging
the little trilobite from its rest of hundreds
of millions of years, sunlight brighter than once
found it at the bottom of the shallow sea.
11.-19.09.2024
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