052719

Iapetus Ascendant*

Upon the shore of the world-ocean,

Dwelt a hermit: old, and broken,

Sieving colored sands that made a carpet by its door,

It shed a dirty tear for long-forgotten Singapore.

Each hovel-wall bore token,

Of a myriad sad emotions,

Like the scars of countless battles which its withered body bore.

Its gender wasn't clear

And is not recorded here,

For its natal sex was altered many times to its distress,

Yet every soft caress came to it like a breathless yes,

And it seemed to view with lust,

Bodies with or without bust.

(It had formerly pursued each sex to passionate excess.)

From the hermit's hut extended,

Great Iapetus, distended,

A watery abyss like none had been since days of yore,

When Panthalassa died 200 million years before.

The waves that shaped the beach,

Had excessive fetch and reach,

Having come around the globe to spend their lives against the shore.

The hermit gazes on a land,

That's broken: burnt and barren sand.

Forgotten cities buried sleep where skulking shadows whilom creep,

And toxins still are wont to seep, like secrets which the graveyards keep...

And sullen aborigines,

Lacking hope or energies,

listless roam the groaning heaps of lava where the geysers leap.

Still the Sea in ceaseless pounding,

Churns and batters its surrounding,

Races from each crumbling shore to lash the rocks a little more.

Far below the heaving surface silver fishes by the score,

Fleetly flutter through the rubble,

Of a world past any trouble,

Countless bones lie dreaming there of empires gone forevermore.

*Iapetus was the ancestral Atlantic Ocean. Panthalassa was the ancestral (and much larger) Pacific.