The Land We Dreamed: Poems

Coal

125 Coal The shallow seas rose and fell quietly. Great swamps lived and died along their rims. There were no seasons. There was no end to the warm moist weather. Life had no limits in oxygen-rich air. Plants exceeded the imagination. Mosses grew to forty feet. Ferns and horse-tails to sixty. Slender climbing plants with whorls of leaves threatened to overrun them all. The seas shimmered with small animals devoured by five-armed hunters and snakelike worms. Giant mollusks with toothed hinges were disembodied mouths. Great sponges and tree-sized corals 126 filled up the floor. Armored fish with the jaws of snapping turtles ambushed tiny plant-eating sharks. Lungfish and fifty-inch sea scorpions invaded the land. Dragonflies with thirty-inch wings filled the air. Giant spiders and oversized ticks roamed the forests flashing like exotic jewelry. Here, diamond-encrusted gold brooches stalked the undergrowth for anything smaller than themselves, there, emerald and ruby earrings clung patiently to drooping fronds, waiting for a meal. Twenty-foot lizards with scales like plates hurried by, quicker than dinosaurs. Seven-foot millipedes were voracious. 127 The swamps and seas came and went. The vociferous struggle of all the ravenous creatures, the intricate motives of the great plants were forgotten under the unbearable weight of three hundred million years. Reduced to their lowest selves, they became buried seams of voiceless coal. They waited in smothered darkness for coughing diesels to move the earth, releasing once more their urgent hungers, the burden of their needy appetites into the hills where waw-bigon -ag, wildflowers Shawnee girls once loved to wear, would wither and die, where lilies would 128 no longer chase the dripline of retreating snows, old ones falling as new ones rose. ...