K-T

The impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period, the so-called
K-T boundary, exterminated 75 percent of life on Earth.
— Robert Sanders, ‘Fossils Document the Hour After
the Meteor Hit’ (Portside, March 29, 2019).

Strange rain of molten glass,
asteroid rock blown up, sky-high –
Primordial fish hurled by the sea-quake
onto sand once breathed, through gills,
the shining drops that rained down, burning,
even after they lay still.

❄

Shocked quartz & shattered shark teeth;
proto-mammals petrified;
foot-long feathers; fallen tektites
in the filaments of gills;
a terrible lizard’s three-horned carcass –
proof of impact, ecocide.

❄

Stellar traveler pulverized
to rock-dust & iridium,
you made oceans rise & sway,
called acid rain & darkness down,
sprayed rubble, ash & blast debris
into the firestorm of the sky.

❄

Who’ll recognize the turning of
one era to the next? Not
the living things wiped out in
mass extinctions of the past,
nor we who, sifting relics,
monitor apocalypse.

❄

In the gleaming core of amber,
hangs an insect caught in flight –
In the post-Cretaceous layer,
ferns, resurgent, fought & thrived.
Bones like pages in a journal,
fossilized, give up their light.