Rather Recently in Earth’s History

Unless you like reading about it,
You probably don’t know just how weird
Life on Earth probably was back when.

For instance, and this is just the one
Of many for-instances out there,
Under the dirt of Wales are layers

Of formerly Southern Hemisphere,
Four-hundred thirty million years old,
Post-Cambrian, pre-Devonian.

Earth spun faster, days and nights were quick,
Oxygen lower but rising, then.
Sex was happening, but birds and bees,

Even lizards were a long way off.
There weren’t any woody plants on land,
No giant dragonflies or scorpions yet.

(Those evolved drenched in oxygen
So dense they didn’t need lungs
To grow big as today’s hawks and dogs,

But their heady days were also far,
Far in the future for the thinner
Atmosphere of the Silurian.)

The land along that coast was covered
Not with trees or ferns, much less grasses,
But with items vaguely resembling

Crosses between great termite towers,
Stone obelisks, and today’s morels,
Phallic fungi four times human height.

For you, their Earth would be alien,
More so than your fantasy planets,
And then, you’d be just as alien,

But all that it took was time—rhythmic,
Cyclical, pulsing, oscillating,
Spinning, orbiting repetitions,

Plus the occasional disruptive
Change not to be confused with such clocks.
Now here you are, digging into Wales,

First for coal and later for science,
Peering at these alien layers
And finding the charcoal where they burned.