Black Venn
These blackened cliffs are made of mud and walking to the ocean,
And so unspill with every step the unremembered dead;
Thrown out -- like breaths, the memories of a shallow sea,
That pooled in lapping silence o'er this tepid shelf of life.
All brought to fecund flower in one vital summer's heat
That lasted for a chron; two hundred million years ago
Bouyant with benthonic grace in the Tethys dying swell -
-- Here the bold Atlantic came to birth and rude aborning
Ripped continents apart. Opened with a midwife's knife
The mid atlantic ridge strides high, splits plates asunder
And sets land sailing, breaking, drifting, dancing to the north.
Submerged, subsumed, growing, scaling, dipping, twisting, changing.
Rising from the depths, climbing from the ocean that obscured,
Waters fall before them and these cliffs walk up towards sky.
Oceans find new paths; families and orders rise and fall;
Birds wheel noisy in the heavens, fish drift quiet in shoals.
Deserts race with earnest drought, blink with angry heat, blow out, die;
And softened summers bend their backs to winter's frantic scolds,
And deep within these banks are laid the bones of creatures strange
Who shall not swim these seas again, whose days are long gone past;
Whose memories are faded save for those the black cliffs hold;
Walking, burdened with time: they pace slowly, surely onwards
To an ocean born of change, disruptive of their aeon.
They bear no malice, merely old memories to unload;
Spewing forth the dead upon the sand -- their own digested skin
Tasted and spat out by the ever hungry churning waves;
They walk, they pace, they stumble towards the ancient new
Spill forth their sacrifice, bend down before the present.
Proud in these final dying moments. They forget -- release
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