Prehistoric

The kids pause beside a bluff
to touch its bands of sediment—
soft silt of an inland sea
or vast lagoon, now thin and rough
as deckle edges of a book,
epochs compressed to signatures
cockled with faults and folds—
and wonder which pertain to us.
Were any people here back then?
Before the answer comes, they bolt
and race each other down the trail
through a ravine of moss and lichen
to splash across a shallow creek,
still of an age that has no end.

From the poet:

This poem is from Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, a hilly region full of hoodoos, bluffs, and canyons. On the exposed rock, strata sometimes look like sewn sections of an old book, perhaps a “book of ages” lying shut, too heavy to open. In the poem, I set the vast scale of geological epochs against the quick movement of children. The poem encompasses both measures of time and holds them in suspension.