National Poetry Month, Day 15 | Brad Lechner & Sylvia Clare
April 15, 2021
Photo by Brad Lechner
Footprints on the sand
by Sylvia Clare
Footprints on the sand, - Anthropocene Lucy.
Someone walked here long ago, evaporated,
marks in sand preparing to become fossil records.
No bottles with messages from afar, to be read
by some excited stranger, a connection across space and time
Imagine, the rest of the world carries on regardless,
fauna must start from the beginning. Humans were here!
The world has stopped on this beach. Tides come and go gently,
marking hours without number, rhythms of eternity.
Trees, blighted by storm, re-establishing their presence.
No plastic discards, broken down, part of the ecosystem.
No turtles lumber here at night to lay their eggs,
No birds plunge their beaks into the watery sands edge
to find mollusks, shellfish, invertebrates.
Life, earth endures, always surviving our
destructive natures, stripped, bleached, naked,
unclothed,
echoes of teeming lives of all those who once walked these shores.
What have we done?