Sunrise

Sunrise
Sunrise on Sunset Beach

Thursday, September 19, 2019

To Heal an Epoch

Do not despair for Earth, beloved. 
    All you know will pass away 
but in the mortal life of Gaia 
    a billion years are yet to be. 

With her a hundred thousand years 
    is as a half a day, 
and a cycle of seasons is just a beat 
    of the pulse that cleanses the world. 

So look to the sea where her cycles reset. 
    Consider the coastal ocean 
where infusion of open sky 
    meets the dissolution of land. 

It happens atom by atom in the vastness
    of a droplet where a thousand algae 
live out their lives basking the paths
    of sunbeams, drawing carbon from the sea.

Out of a thousand, a broken cell settles
    out of the sunlit realm, down through dark
abyssal depths it drifts to oblivion,
    atoms entombed on the ocean floor. 

As seasons crowd the centuries 
    in the stately drift of millennia, 
what happens to microscopic lives 
    clears the air and heals the sea. 

For as sure as aged detrital muck 
    locks carbon into hardened rock; 
as sure as winter’s freeze and thaw 
    and summer squalls carve paths in stone; 

as sure as the Rockies erode to the Plains, 
    sink into seas and rise again; 
as sure as the God of second chances 
    is God of seventy times seven chances – 

Gaia will weave an Eden again.