StacyCowley.com

Ab Aeterno



       "Someone who has 11,000 years, 100 years to lose here or there is not that much."
       --Faruq Saad Eddin


The guns go off and the floods come and the cities rise and fall, but the rocks remember.


The dirt remembers. The trees eavesdrop on an era, but their roots talk with the ground, and the ground tells its ageless tales.


This land was once dense with trees, the surface whispers.
Then buildings,
then skyscrapers,
reaching through the clouds, 100 stories of ore-turned-steel and sand-turned-glass, packed with souls weaving stories: so urgent, so fleeting.
Some souls look at the clouds and admire them, envy them, snap photos to hold them.
Some commune with the ground and feel the ancient dirt --
but most drift over it, their feet falling on dust they never touch.
The dust endures.
Buildings to skyscrapers and skyscrapers to ashes, then back again --
the land raises the cities and absorbs the cities and listens to the cities:
the fragile, fleeting cities whirling in fast-time and etching their frantic energy on every molecule they can seize.


The memory is hazy; the foresight, hazier. The details don't linger.
Graveyards and theatres and libraries and labs, they blur.
The land can't read the pages in history books,
but it feels their weight
and knows the panopoly arcs on.


Every eon is a footnote, the dirt says to the trees.
Reach your leaves to the sky, stretch out your roots
and memorialize the stars,
reflecting the light of vanished centuries.