Saturday, 24 September 2011

Ghosts


Time passes, and time leaves ghosts,
ghosts came when the asteroids cooled in early seas.
Ghosts swirled the soup with ladles of molten ice,
shifting carbon and hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen
until single-celled life emerged and matured,
worms and bony fish and plated amphibians.
There are sea-ghosts of squids and lung fish.
Chambered nautiluses drift like spectres.
Forests remember change, distant shaking,
the tread of narrow-eyed, knob scaled kangaroos
and scurrying, egg-stealing mammals,
the meek would one day rule the world –
world rulers can be meek no more.
The skies remembered the asteroids.
The dinosaurs sprouted feathers
and remembered the skies.


copyright (c) 1997 and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop
This poem was first published in the Sangreal Limited Edition Chapbook

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