Vulnerable and Dangerous

The mind keeps losing itself
In thoughts of those tiny cells
Somewhere near the beginning

Of living, for all that means.
Whatever they were, barely
Vacuoles in smoking vents,

Self-fueling fires on crystals
Submerged in baths of what worked
For their multiplication,

How small and fragile they were,
And so inconsequential
At first. Add a billion years,

Another and another,
And still, what was all of life
But some filmy residue?

Yet how dangerous they were,
Not, at first, to each other,
And not to the twirling Earth,

But to all their descendants
Who would live out the patterns
Established by them—hunger,

Suffering, extinction, waste.
Them’s the breaks. Too many years
To go back and start over,

But what if an asteroid
Had murdered them in their crib,
When they were vulnerable?

And if they’d started again
Other ways? Would their offspring
Have lived better, had they lived?