Earth That Wakes

The geologists have done their job

Confirming Emily Jane Brontë.

The lonely mountains do hold glory

And grief more than any life could tell.

They’ve done their job by excavating

So much of the old past in the near

That what really dizzies you, or should,

Is an awareness of what’s unknown.

Given these fragments, what was the whole

Glory and grief of millenniums

By the hundreds, by millenniums?

Yes, these were some of the bones, and these

Are some of our best reconstructions,

But how many more millions of lives

Went underhill, into these mountains?

Small wonder folks imagine spirits

Or fairies, various huldufolk,

The little people of traditions

Found in so many parts of the world.

It’s a typical failing, of course,

Of imagination to conceive

Of all haunting lives as humanish,

And even Emily Jane Brontë

Wasn’t thinking of the bones of fish,

The lives of reptiles, extinct cousins

Of Subsaharan megafauna,

Etc. She had history

And maybe prehistory, or Nature

Alone, or something spiritual,

Most likely on her mind at the time.

But she got it right. There’s more to tell

Than any one life could of how lives

Held both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.