The last of the old earth

We are the last of the old earth.

The last of the ancient line that bore their young from their bodies, who cared for them or left them to their fate. Who ate each other, reaping and killing and chewing. Who were sickened, afflicted, parasitized. Who used ears to hear the cries of their cousins, their lovers, to hear a hint of music. Whose teeth were hard in the flesh of their mouths. Who sensed their world with dendrite. Those whose flesh rotted, whose bones crumbled or petrified. Those who walked in frames of hydroxyapatite and protein on the old earth when the sun shone still.

Who drew oxygen through lungs, gills, to sustain life. Those they were who were at the mercy of the unseen blow, the fall, the crackling of age. Those who held each other, who groomed and preened. Who built a hope of safety out of a mess of twigs. Who strove for more than they received.

Those last ones, those that held a pen and a sword, and walked on two legs. Who began to sow and herd our kin, to reap what we sowed and to take what we wanted. Who built invisible automata - languages, community, culture - with our fingers and our lips. Who built towers to our dreams and found the music that lives in the castle of heaven. Who made art of sustenance, communication, meaning, shelter, we were those who made art of our survival. Who strove for more, more, and never found safety. Who tricked and raped and killed, yes those ones are our forefathers. Who loved truly and falsely, enjoyed, sought to be better than we were, deserved better than we got. Who learned and prosletized, each the last true one of their culture, but not yet the last of the old earth.

Those very last ones who let go of the pen and the sword. Who finally defeated their ancient enemies, some of them, and who anyway etched enemies anew, stroke by deliberate stroke until the picture snarled. Who broke the atom and the cell open, and with it the world. Who burned and gorged and built machines of death. Who were baffled by Moloch and torn apart from their hearts, out of their hearts and into their nature and the calculus of the universe. Who, still, loved and dreamed through mind and eyes and tongue of meat, who built beauty and magic and art beyond the fantasies of their foremothers. Yet those who drilled down, ever deeper down, into the sand and awoke their successors.

Those very last, the last to breathe, to birth, to feel the warmth of embrace through their body, to taste food on their tongue, to have music swirl from cartilage into synapse and spark a new feeling, a new yearning. Present.

I weep that we are the last of the old earth, for my eyes are not clear enough to see what follows, and my heart cannot hold what has passed, what is passing.