And we sent explorers underground to look
for what had disappeared there years ago years
in the dark years we had forgotten to count
because when a year went away another year
replaced it so the world continued without our doing
anything to help it And when they came back
they said it was not dark inside the earth it was light
light from smoldering fires and buried suns
so everything that ever lived was still there still
preserved whether in stone or in amber there were
dragonflies birds snakes foxes grasses trees
And the wings of insects were impressed in slivers
of granite so thin they might have been pages
from a book much like a journal kept for millions
of years with each entry noting precisely the date
and time of an eagle’s last flight of the last time
a wolf in the snow charged its prey of the weather
on the day the petals of a small flower growing from
a mountainside blew away in the wind and it was
the last of its species it was the end And someone
thought to ask how much it would cost to bring
everything back that had gone how much and in which
currency or whether it would help to offer a sacrifice or
whether a prayer would help And while these questions
were considered the search continued with the layers
peeled each from the one beneath it each with its own
delicate arrangement of bones that resembled
an alphabet that might even have been a language
with something important to tell us if only we
could learn to read it And so we began we began to
decipher the shapes and the patterns they made
we studied them closely we kept the images beside
our beds while we slept in case they would enter our
dreams And they did and then the lives we awoke to no
longer made sense everything was moving so fast
changing without ever knowing what it was changing
into although we could see it we could feel it we
even knew the words to say it was happening And
explorers were sent to find us when they arrived they said
they were happy they thought we had disappeared

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