No Human Bones

At the Gray Fossil Site
the record of life here
in these foothills goes
one hundred thirty-five
feet deep. All of it,
except the surface
dug by road-building machinery
(to discover the first skull)
or walked by farmer or
lover, is untouched
by humans.

In spite of the power
of the sabre-toothed cat,
the power of the Tennessee alligator
(the skull discovered first),
in spite of the violence
of their hunger and will,
how peaceful must that
one hundred thirty-five
feet of vegetable and bone
gone to earth
have been as,
over four-and-a-half million years it
shifted,
sifted,
settled.


My seven-year-old granddaughter is visiting our house for a few days during her fall break, and we spent part of this afternoon at the Gray Fossil Site. So this not-so-good poetry effort grew out of that. I almost went preachy on this as I was writing it out on a sheet of paper but stopped myself. As you can tell, the between-the-lines suggestion of the poem is that Tennyson's "Nature, red in tooth and claw," was a different kind of violence than that which humans use to destroy one another, physically, socially, spiritually, economically, culturally--the violence of ideology (religious and political, in particular), of greed, of us vs. them, the self-righteous "I," the conspiratorial "THEY." None of that inhabited those prehistoric swamps, fields or forests, because none of us were there to bring these things to that world.

There, I've gone preachy anyway.