Natural Selection

   Who trusted God was love indeed
    And love Creation's final law
    Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
    With raving, shriek'd against his creed
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., Canto 56

Centuries are linked by millions
of words that are mined for meaning
like the pure carbon of a diamond,
a black-lunged reason to believe

amid a paralyzing atmosphere of
appointed days, where even the gimlet
eye of God doesn't augur the taste
of copper from an empty cough.

Within one nucleus of our breath
are libraries of cell, denizens
of geological formations fossilized
into the fabric of our selves.

Genes are forever, but aging
depletes memory like a drought
reducing water to a wrinkled body
of river bed debris. The double

helix of our immortal coil is held
together by light and moisture,
blood and history, but is shriveling
like a severed umbilical cord between two

species on the verge of extinction
and an understanding helplessly flailing
to be born before sod is broken for bones
and meaning is buried in earth, again.  

~