THE AGE OF HUMANS

Waterways, red cliffs, ancient underwater caves, back to the Pangea age, continents fused as one. I stand in the stardust of a million-year-old memory, a flutter of songbirds, a bouquet of warblers, the wild swoop of blue jays. Hummingbirds check me out. My breath hovers over crimson wildflowers. Long before the idea of a kiss, when love was mystery, the earth entered it’s quaternary period, the age of humans. A time of gestation, anticipation, the Great Lakes birthing, hawks soaring, the first migration. All we see of that coded mapping are faint skeletal imprints, visible in glacial rock formations. The stone I cradle, a mountain remnant, honors the ancestral presence and my encounter with raw existence The lake shivers as falcons dive, beaks and talons fisted and footed. A drop of water touches my face. Profound. As much as a human caress.