The Asteroid and the Cherry Blossom

My heart makes a slow sad sound
As I walk through the mist,
Not a beautiful song either, more like the mournful bellowing of a dying dinosaur
Echoing across the dust-darkened plain
Wondering why the world is changing
And whether the sun will ever return.

The asteroid changed everything for you,
Dear dinosaurs
You poor dumb beasts
You wide eyed cows of lizards
You ancestors to birds–

And it feels lately my life has been nothing but a series of asteroids
Asteroids gut-punching me one after the other
Leaving my vision clouded with dust
Wandering in the darkness
Wondering why it has to be this way
And I hear the cries of my fellow creatures
Beside me in the darkness
Long low sad bellows
Like cows that have not been milked
Like dinosaurs that have not been milked
(For dinosaurs give milk, they have discovered
Far from being the cold blooded monsters of their erstwhile reputations)

And my heart aches for my fellow creatures
Those strange voices full of a familiar pain
But I cannot touch them
All of us equally lost
Our bodies aching for someone who will drink our milk
Drink in our song
Look us in the eye and make us real
Touch our heart and make us important

Oh mourn for those poor dumb dinosaurs
Dying in the tar pits and beside the rivers which parched to trickles
And could not soothe their thirsty dinosaur throats
Is this what it feels like to live on a dying world? Or has the world always been dying?
The old, dying to give place to the new?

Bless you, dinosaurs in your dumb confusion
Dinosaur cubs cowering below their mothers
Pain of mother and child spilling out in rivers and making the world new
New, for us, the age of mammals.

And now we have made the world old again,
Flushing it with fever and scarring it with blight.
But my heart is still young, and it is aching
Unwilling to give the next era it’s chance
I love the way things are,
But everything is changing now and I cannot be the same person tomorrow I was today.

If only I might someday
Go back and meet myself as a child
And remember why I smiled then.
If only I could hold myself as a child and we could whisper together
“Everything’s okay”
But that will never happen
Because each moment by necessity of time kills the previous moment
And it may be okay
But cherry blossoms fallen may never be retrieved

So I gulp and swallow and gather my courage,
And set my sail into darkness
The boat gliding over the bottomless deep
Perhaps if I am lucky my love may be waiting for me on the opposite shore
Holding that baby dinosaur tenderly
In his arms
Protecting its blinking baby dinosaur eyes
From the harsh light of the new-risen sun
Brighter now, without its veil of ozone.

In darkness and in light
We step between epochs