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Mistaken

1.
Clenched in Snowball Earth's ice viced grip,
survivors hid, shunning sterile shores
and as eternal winter melted, drip by drip,
a forest stitched the silty oceans' floors.

Crinkled spindles and leafy globes open,
man-high, thumbnail thin, sentinel fronds.
Multicellular life, freshly woven,
modules linked and branched with fractal bonds.

Too dark, too deep, to be photosynthetic,
nutrients were gleaned through membranes fluted.
Strewn in an unseen ghostly aesthetic,
not plants but animals, static, rooted.

In places, Earth's belches and coughed ash
sank, killed, coated and cast still life tableaux.
Sediments weighted and imbued the cache,
layer on layer of time-locked plateaus.

Hundreds of millions of years rearranged Earth's wrinkles,
dipped or exposed, buckled crusty scabs.
Pink and white volcanic ash sprinkles
fleck glacier scrubbed pitched grey slabs.

Erosion exposes a false beginning,
fossils of creatures which nature scrapped.
Immobility jinxed their innings,
condemned as unable to adapt.

Minimal repetitive genetic commands,
holdfasts marked by circle and groove,
hint at no scope to meet the demands
of competitors, newly evolved to move.

Failed experiment thwarted by simplicity,
a ‘survival of the fittest' flashpoint.
Outcasts' remains with unknown affinity
on the sculpted rocks of Mistaken Point.

2.
Perched above the Atlantic, fog-wrapped,
fractured cliffs concede a slant ledge outpost.
Raked by winter's storm waves, white-capped,
mariners thread rocks on a shipwreck coast.

'Seabirds on the port bow' the seaman bawled,
a sign of land near, though in truth his ears,
could hardly pick their shrieks from the howling squall.

[...] Read more

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