Jewelers, in goggles and buttercup hard hats, chip out a cameo of dinosaur bones - vertebrae necklaces, pelvic abstracts, a baby stegosaurus skull like a Disney dragon. The entire mountain's flank is chiseled out, a bas-relief of rainy-day deaths on a sandbar long before the bingo card of our genes filled up. Big in the hips herself, it's not surprising that earth would remember these. But like a sentimental woman who hoards old dance cards and ribbons from corsages, she'll keep a feather or the baby starfish of a waterbird's footprint one hundred fifty million years. As I have treasured the whorls of my son's day-old toes, printed on his birth certificate, so she preserved four million years two journeys taken on the same day at Laetoli - the long scratch of a millipede's furrow in the dust and a human romp of family footprints, as they passed in the ashes. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...YOUNG LINCOLN by EDWIN MARKHAM HOLES BORED IN A WORKBAG BY THE SCISSORS by MARIANNE MOORE MATER IN EXTREMIS by JEAN STARR UNTERMEYER THE BALLAD OF THE DARK LADIE; A FRAGMENT by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE THE FLIRT by WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES |