Thanks to Professor Ursula Goodenough for her help in shaping the chronology of this poem as it pertains to earliest life on earth
My time machine stocked and fueled,
I fired the ignition and left today behind
and set course for yesterday
in search of the key
to unlock the ultimate mystery.
Pausing first at Wyandotte General,
I peered through the glass
at the hour of my birth
where mother’s exhausted smile
eased my empathetic dread.
My journey had just begun.
Steering my vessel back in time
I stole into the back pew at my
great-grandparents's wedding
then soared across the Atlantic
far above the tall ships carrying
my forebears to their new living fields.
A notable step to be sure,
but only an eye blink from today.
My people had managed to dodge
Europe’s wretched plagues
and sword carrying religious pretenders.
I watched with sorrow as
empires flourished and collapsed.
My soul ached with the
hypnotic rhythm
of first and final breaths
as life's essential cycles
retreated into antiquity.
The breath of prophets
drifted over the hills and rivers,
past fields, flocks and shepherds.
But there was still
no sign of a beginning.
I retraced our footprints
back from Europe
to the tropics of Africa
and recorded our first words
spoken in an unknown and extinct tongue.
In wonder, I witnessed
our first faltering bipedal steps
some 10,000 generations ago
by the light of newly kindled fires
dotting the evening campgrounds.
I slipped my vessel back in gear
and fed it some fuel;
for I still had eons to go.
I flew over ancient fur covered cousins
foraging the woods and glades on all fours -
their eyes scouring the earthscape
searching for higher paths.
I waited patiently on the beach
until mega-great grandmother
crawled from the sea and
drank oxygen fresh from the sky.
Though she was first on land
my destination was still distant.
My craft passed beneath clouds
over limitless waters
where countless ocean denizens
fed and multiplied below -
the numbers of species
diminishing with each millennium
traversed back toward the source.
DNA strands shortened.
and the sea became a lonelier
and more desolate expanse:
our precursors losing
organs and motility.
Minute sea creatures,
buffeted by the shifting currents,
had but a few cells
and then -
One.
Three and a half billion years from home,
I took my post at the threshold and waited.
Hovering over the turbulence
of an oceanic storm
above the thermal troughs,
I peered into the darkness.
a sudden flash broke the surface
and a cluster of amino acids
began to assemble, vibrate and divide.
The tingling beneath my skin
told me I had arrived at last
at my primordial self,
rocking gently in the dark fertile folds
of the vast and inscrutable sea.
August, 2007