PARANTHROPUS CAPENSIS

We presumed they were on their way out

by then, the cousins of our ancestors;

in our thoughts we had reduced their

genus to the fringes of the evolutionary

diorama by then, eating their tough

roots without a stone tool to be seen,

waiting for their last few hundred

thousand years to run out before

mineralizing into fossils. But now,

here we have capensis, late in the day,

resurrected into knowing from

a museum cabinet, no longer one

of our forefathers and foremothers,

but a sprig from that robust line

evolving towards something less

specialized, more like our ancestors

had been a million years earlier,

making it's way from a cul-de-sac

towards wide open evolutionary road

to future forms. It's like the nature

would have had second thoughts

about our father and mother Homo

erectus, seen something of what

we would become, and reached

for a Plan B. We won, we won

the crown, the thumb on

the trigger to bring a nuclear

Holocaust after all our other

holocausts, we won our shame

of the Sixth Mass Extinction,

the shame of all the extinct

brother and sister species

flickering out at our arrival

in the lands they inhabited,

and somewhere along the way

we perhaps cast a stone or,

if they lingered on the edges

of that diorama long enough,

a spear that killed the last

Paranthropus capensis

or some form born of it,

still hidden in rock

or a museum cabinet.

10.02.2025

Lyric #Lyric Lyrics #Lyrics Poem #Poem Poem #Poems Poetry #Poetry Verse #Verse