poem: Dinosaur Footprints

Dinosaur Footprints

Villagers once sang and danced the Morris;
And gathered boughs and flowers for the May.
Their steps, and those of all who walked before us,
Replete with tunes and costumes, die away.
Homeric epics, flowery poems by Horace,
Like cities buried many layers deep,
Fine Grecian chairs, and polychromed amphoras
Fade like dreams when sunshine spoils our sleep.

The poetic histories of Apollodorus
Xenophon's work, a volume of Strabó.
Heródotus we have, and Diodorus,
And, likely altered, those of Manethó.
Ctesias' works have washed down the pylorus,
While winds debrided carvings off of cliffs.
Gone are cities to waves, to floods, to forests!
Caves hold the oldest, hidden petroglyphs.

Gone was the tune, the intro, verse and chorus,
Before archaeology rose to make its stand.
Sima Qian and Ouyang Xiu made way for us,
Shen Kuo proposed that time had lent its hand,
His fossils told of change events that bore us
From seashelled coast to inland high terrain,
From glades of bamboo, where the former shore was,
To arid climate or glacial moraine.

Othniel Marsh, archaeologist Ursae Majoris,
Brought in a beautiful skeleton with no head,
And so was born the mythic "Brontosaurus,"
That sported another species' skull instead.
The sparks flew, as if from an electrophorus.
But Othniel's earlier finds proved to be true:
So enter the elegant, huge, Apatosaurus
Whose top-nostriled head we almost never knew.

Scientists haven't always been decorous:
They've fiddled and twiddled ideas beyond the pale.
They tell us spacetime's one gigantic torus,
But it may be just a Brontosaurus' tail.

-- Leslie G. Harper
May 23, 2008