Mid-week Verse: Panchronos

Hello and welcome to a few feature on my blog: every week I will post a sample of my poetry. I'll start with my poetry project that was the equivalent of a dissertation when I completed my Bachelor's degree: Panchronos, a series of poems based on our geological periods. I hope you enjoy.

 

Part 1: Neoproterozoic

Tonian

 

Farewell, Rodinia, you crumble and crack.

Say goodbye to a billion of boring

A gradual collage of blue and cyan.

Monotonous choking

But not for you,

And there is nothing else to do

But watch you go,

Not

Much

Happens

Wait, is that an animal?

 

Cryogenian

 

Snowball Earth snowballs out of control,

A Sturtian winter will not go.

 

Freeze life, freeze our home,

How do we survive?

Will this frozen hell end or boost life?

 

Pulsing glaciers come and go.

When exactly, no one knows.

Tropical ice, life suffocates in snow,

How much ice? No one knows.

 

You marinate in this Marinoan world,

Tip over the tipping point.

Leave your rocks, your little clues,

We’ll piece it back together

Maybe.

 

Ediacaran

 

Block by block, step by step

We grow bigger, an animal world.

First steps, big steps, organs for organisms who

Wriggle and float.

 

Violent tides, earth spins,

Alien oceans of alien creatures,

Grandmother Tethys and

Unrecognisable ancestors, but few survive

Or all perish from our tree, strange family.

 

What were you? Where are you now?

Who were you, you tiny pioneers?

A blueprint, prototype, surrendering the ocean to the new

Explosion.

Part 2: Paleozoic

 

Cambrian

 

An explosion of life

In the shallow grave of Pannotia.

Arthropods stare into the colour of hunter vs hunted.

The metazoan family tree, where trees do not grow

Echoes today, a brilliant map, dormant in the rocks.

Trilobites scuttle along the nursery seas,

Snubbing barren wastelands

Trapped in their own body,

Pineapple jaws on their armoured trail.

Rise of the arthropods, the apex anomalocaris.

Or! What if!

Armour on the inside

Wiggle in and out

            Almost fish

                                    Maybe fish

And up and down

Leap of faith

We will survive the blast.

 

Ordovician

 

You think you were the only one

To flourish and bloom

In a bath of sapphire?

To make the shallow waves and grains

Your own?

 

The extinction that never was,

Or may or may not have been.

Fossils are a clue, but they’re the edges of a

                                    Puzzle buried in the sand,

                                                Paper flickering out of a burning book.

 

Older words and understandings of our world.

But I grew and extended my arms.

Scorpion claws snap at fledgling jaws.

The blueprints of future dynasties

Began life as creepy crawlies’ prey.

 

Dry out and lie baked on desert dirt,

            Our home solidifies far away,

No one to scavenge my body,

The extinction that decimated.

 Devastated.

 

Silurian

 

We were not the first to scuttle onto land.

Creeping, crawling arthropods followed the plants.

Millipedes scuttle through dwarf forests, cooksonia and toxic air.

Scavenging beaches edging desert,

Whatever the sea churns out, monster food.

 

Things are not what they seem in this alien world,

But there are familiar faces here.

 

A stable greenhouse of islands,

And monster Gondwana,

South of the monster scorpions.

Eurypterids rule over us:

Little fish born in a vast ocean.

Devonian

 

Little fish, fear the big fish!

Big fish, fear the monster with armour for teeth.

Win the race against the pincers,

Only to become the prey of your own cousin:

The prototype, preliminary placoderms.

 

Crunch and shred and snap!

Is there a way to escape the jaws of the shark?

Your sapling family tree must not

Be dumped and dunked

Into the jaws of dunkleosteus.

 

Escape to shore,

But do you think, by growing legs, you can run?

You need to come crawling back,

And when you return,

They will be waiting.

Carboniferous

 

Far and wide and up, up high

Diamond wings glisten and zoom

Past your eyes, gone in an instant,

A dragonfly the size of an eagle.

 

An emerald blanket hugs the world,

Mega-insects rule the lush, soaked swamps,

A millipede longer than a man scuttles amongst the club moss.

You crawl onto dry earth, not dry for long.

 

The water is not safe.

Sharks, unchallenged,

Prowl sea and lake alike.

 

A home on land,

                        Now time to split:

Two families                           Two dynasties

Two branches                          Two trees

One on top                              One in the shadows

One                                         Two

Temporal fenestra                   Temporal fenestra

Forever battle.

 

Forests collapse, world withers and dries.

We live in the smog of your ghosts.

 

Permian

 

You were set to conquer the world.

 

Proto project   stem strategy

Spread your sails                far and wide,

Prey on your doppelgängers.

 

The leading formula

                                    The winning build?

Build on the design    dance the predator-prey arms race

Grow and evolve.

 

            Evolve sabres

                        Evolve venom

Maybe.

 

Eternal desert hugging the universal sea

Tethys smothers her mother

Adapt to a dry life – the swamp is gone now

Your home will disappear one day.

 

Cross the sabre-toothed deserts of Pangea,

Hug the new mother ocean

The most monstrous killer

                        Will be brought to its knees

As the world boils and broils

Trilobites cannot outrun this explosion.

 

95% gone forever.

 

Life suffocates     pushed to the edge

Hope you don’t boil   just

Like

Your

Planet. 

 

Part 3: Mesozoic

Triassic

 

Picking skin                Picking pieces                         Picking niches

Pangea arena.

Archosaur stand straight

Stand               feed                 bipedal

Recover                       prepare

One of us will rule a red world

Sandwiched between two catastrophes.

Tethys reborn

As is life.

Dawn of the eon with eoraptor, eodromaeus

A quiet revolution, dinosauromorph morphs to dinosaur, invisible line

The edge, an advantage,

But even Herrera’s lizard was not on top yet.

Why should you take the crown when you have yet to earn it?

When you can be swept away in a suffocating world?

Your air heals as you take to it.

Your oceans heal as you dive into it.

One rule                                              More succumb.

 

Jurassic

 

At last, one winner in the land of forever.

Pangea cracks, the world burns,

A stroke of luck leaves you on top

            And the world exhales.

 

Twin supercontinents / Time to mushroom into the shapes we awe / and ossified shudders / ringing from the ghosts of our ancestors. / Dew steams in the tropical, morning sun / A jaw rises from the river / watery red drips down / ignore the lumbering Sauropods on the other bank. / Silent, therian evolution / the birth of your surviving child / one from each family. / Legacy of feather and fur / Beautiful combination of adaptations. / Babble of rain bounces on ferns and cycads / monkey puzzle rainforest / forage, avoid the stegosaurus tail. / The beautiful picture on land matched only by the azure and red seas / baby oceans create a map of monsters. / Predator X stalks the arctic waters / fish-mimic reptiles with mouthfuls of squid / in its

plentiful world.

Cretaceous

 

Broaden your leaves, then broaden horizons,

A silent revolution of coevolution,

            A partnership lasting forever.

 

Hell’s ocean, you’re snapped up by a Kronosaurus,

Turn of the clock, now a Mosasaurus,

Take a dive with the Hesperornis

            Into wild, warm water, churned by teeth and fins,

Into the jaws of the sharks and crocodiles.

            A dangerous world for gentle Archelon,

Bloodied oceans of underwater America.

 

The crocodiles rule the rivers too, and the seas and the lakes.

Deinosuchus drag dinosaurs to their drowned doom.

 

But in the South Pole, the Koolasuchus patrols unchallenged.

Antarctic forests lie buried in darkness and silence

But still, the dinosaurs make it their home.

Under Aurora Australis, relics and living fossils,

Burrow and scrape out an existence in the frost.

 

In a blinding flash of winter

The building blocks come tumbling down.

Clues at the global crime scene:

Shadows of iridium and shocked quartz,

The outline of Chicxulub.

 

Part 4: Cenozoic

 

Paleogene

 

The wake of destruction is just what we need

            To grow

                        To spread and get

                                    Big.

Would you like to see a magic trick?

Let’s take a creature, let’s call it a rat,

Let’s pull this rat out of the ash,

It becomes a horse as big as a cat,

Now it’s a monkey, now it’s a bat,

Sahara whales born from that rat.

And now

            Everything will collapse.

Not with a bang,

            Not with a crash,

                        Not with a cloud of choking ash,

The subtleties of shifts and movement,

            Goodbye to whales with crocodile jaws,

                                                The balance upset, shifts,

                                    Bounce back.

                        Get.

                        Big.

 

Who is here to stop us?

 

Neogene

 

Colliding continents, they birth mountains;

Death of Tethys, her children patched and drained.

Forests retreat, savannah grass sprouting,

Sahara begins to spread: small, constrained.

South America, the island kingdom,

Isolated, unique in life and form,

Bizarre Terror Birds’ sole dominion,

With the winding land bridge, life is transformed.

Sabre-tooth marsupial, convergent

Dinofelis on the savannah hunts

Grazing game and simian divergent.

Monster shark cannot survive the cold front.

An ape climbed down from the trees and stood tall:

Hominin holding, handling nature’s fall.

Quaternary

 

Frozen planet in cold Quaternary.

Megafauna roam old Quaternary.

 

Soaring and dipping waves, bridging landmass,

And pulsing ice remould Quaternary.

 

In the grasslands of the North Sea, mammoth

Matriarch herds behold Quaternary.

 

Family tree: branch of three old world humans,

One remaining household Quaternary.

 

Robust Neanderthal sat in a cave,

Carving flutes in stronghold Quaternary.

 

Out on the eternal steppe, wandering

Nomads chase the green gold Quaternary.

 

Little Ciarán sits in his room, reading,

Wonder captured and hold Quaternary.

 

 

Epilogue: Anthropocene

 

The human nature,

Clever homo sapian,

To create, destroy.

 

Snails in the garden,

Snails in my bedroom, plastic

Box home, suffocate.

 

Our world burns, our world

Boils, our world fries, our world dies.

New mass extinction.

 

We sit and watch the

Documentaries, for the

Thrill of learning, the

 

Chilling finale:

No species lasts forever.

Long for mammoth pet.

 

Handprint on cave wall,

No species lasts forever,

Megafauna gone.

 

Jumping from the

Sofa: I’m a dinosaur, roar!

Drink paving slab books.

 

Did not know better,

Holocene mass extinction,

Now we just pretend.

 

Time is running out,

No species lasts forever.