Clambering

There’s, what, a few dozen, a few
Hundred of them up there, patches

Of pines and cedars on the cliff.
They look like sessile sea creatures

Colonizing an old shipwreck,
The more so on that prow-shaped cliff.

They don’t appear precarious,
Although their sandstone grip may be.

They’re just bunched there. Ridiculous,
Life, really. How it manages

To get into everything, brace
Its feet against current weathers

And start eating. If it all came
From a single ancestral cell

To this mess, including humans
And the various power plants,

Then, watching these contented trees
Colonizing eroding cliff,

We have to wonder if, maybe
Earth really is the beginning,

Still in the earliest stages
Of where life is going with this.