Best Fossil Poems
What was real and alive, is now real and a trace.
A motionless image of motion, or not. It might be a record of rest, a pause to see where one is, is going, or has been. A rest to make sure that one is alone, when solitude is safety. Or with like, when others mean reliable responses, and a chance to make self. Although it is not really self, but another. Yet, to sow self means to be part of the future, and assume to influence it.
The trace is a focused true touching, or a brush of mere passing, or a death mask impression of being. A chemically sculpted object, whose life motion and lyric sounds have stopped, and just missed its forced silence, while likes scurry away.
It is an accidental graveyard, not planned, but allowed to exist by fixative fluids seeping through piles of grains, glued by near-surface actions, then cemented by pressure into rock that holds that pressure, and by holding, ignores it, while waves of waters flood through subatomic space looking for places that are perfect.
Fossil traces are gifts from the earth gods.
Fossil on the floor…
On his BMX he’d roar
Free style dinosaur
I found a fossil hiding
near something overgrown,
a historical handprint etched
in a slab of ancient stone.
I trace the imprint idly
and marvel at its design-
the grooves coil and curve around,
and then become entwined.
Graphite
Highlight.
Small mat
Found that.
Multi
Holey.
Life verse
Diverse.
Now found
Impound.
Fossil Worlds Yearning
I
find
fossils;
this is my
passion and calling.
But layers of strata show a
separation from them to me, telling me of deep
time passing that will never be bridged. Oh, how I wish I could go back to those past worlds!
For my dear departed friend Dr. Terrence Frest, paleontologists/malacologists. Like those past worlds I wish him back.
A
pot plant,
this cycad-
now four metres
wide
takes
living
in its stride-
Kew's long-lasting
pride
Encephalartos altensteinii
brought to Kew in 1775 from SA,grows one inch a year.
Fossil Friend
Why, just the other day, or so it seems
T-Rex and I were playing by the stream
And tar pits of La Brea
I remember that day like yesterday
I’m just another fossil reminiscing
Where my old friend fell in
And now I visit him
At The Page Museum in Los Angeles
Someday my aging bones will settle down as well
People will speak antiques and talk about my times
Old stomping grounds and ancient finds
Our freedoms imprison us.
Even now we want more than we need,
tho' we do not yet know what we want.
We do without knowing,
we know without doing.
We do without nothing.
Scaremonger the tip of our iceberg hearts.
This is this race of a thousand false starts,
and we, the runner, the player of parts.
We with the stones and the broken glass's.
You with your runaway greenhouse gases.
Her heart still molten,
we've frozen these assets.
This horse is gone,
yet we search for the locks.
We look to the skies,
we watch all the clocks.
The second hand,
our second thoughts.
This futile search,
these last resorts.
This weight of extinction is heavy,
shackling life's gift of buoyancy,
of optimism.
It pulls us under the rising tide of humanity.
We belong to the future,
it does not belong to us.
Dinosaur has been long forgotten
And so the truth
They are all hidden in the fossils
Of the olden days
Away from this century
Archaeologists come up with fossils
But deep hidden truth still not found
So wars, chaos, racism, terrorism, Hegemony, corruptions and epidemics
Continue to burst out
Truth found with the the meditation of philosopher
Is always without acknowledgement of mankind
A fossil of truth is never found
In the present world
And so the truth will continue to become
A fossil of the next generation
A hundred years from now, will I be a fossil
Will geologists discover this warm-blooded morsel
Prey for some creature
But larger and squishier
Like a MacDonald's sweet breakfast waffle
A friend once called me a living fossil
And that pretty well sums me up
Must make an effort to stay in good shape
Though I'm no longer an eager young pup
Need a purpose to get up every morning
To contribute to a daily routine
Once was a very vital link in a company
Lately where has this old guy been
Under a rock, some say out of the loop
That's no exaggeration at all
Is easy to just wander off in the sunset
As relevant as a neanderthal
A relic with a whole lifetime of knowledge
Stored up in this fossil-like brain
So easy to discount old folks like me
But upstairs is a vast fertile terrain
I guess that's this old guy's life in a nutshell
Been sent out to pasture to graze
My expertise on earth is no longer needed
It ended when my hair turned grey
© Jack Ellison 2014
Apostle Who Was A Fossil
Some seem to be calling me an apostle
Who they say looks like an old fossil
With hair which is so gray as can be
And bruised body bent just like a tree
He also does look like an acolyte
Who in a cave is slim as a stalactite
Bones became hard and very brittle
And now is no longer fit as a fiddle.
The middle we found on this fellow
Can be compared to a marsh mellow
And in our each eye comes a tiny tear
When we see him waddle with his rear.
After he finally became a grandfather
Won't lose any weight so why bother
And is it true or could it be a fable?
Heaven does have a big dining room table.
James Thomas Horn
www.poetrysoup.com
When I am but a fossil
All bones, no flesh
Crushed in the earth,
I will dream of discovery
By scientists pondering
Who I was…,
When I lived.
When I am but a fossil
From the distant past
Will someone
Of great renown
Reconstruct me, and ask
Who I was…,
When I lived?
The Pebble
Sat innocuously
Silent and still,
Yet the tale it could tell,
would span a million lifetimes.
Locked inside, for no one to know;
No one yet the pebble,
Is the fossil in it's heart.
To break the fossil free,
loses the stone.
Sit still dear pebble,
retain your secret forever.
Fossilized
Frozen in the earth
Empty shell of a man
No sense of self worth