122119e

Calcimicrobes, We Call Them

They look like a mound of slugs,

Huddled together for warmth,

But they weren't slugs at all,

Living in a salty sea;

What they were, no one knows.

He spends all his time in the lab now,

Looking through the tube

At things that died about

300 million years ago.

These are films of crystals engulfing other crystals,

But once they hung down from a roof

in a living reef,

They reproduced, their children found new homes

And they had children,

Not like his own children;

They were unknowing and unknown,

Spreading across what is now Alabama,

Cementing together the floor of an ancient sea,

A reef without corals,

Dead, no graves to visit,

Except these rocks,

Here, and in Belgium,

In Ireland, in Spain,

And god knows where else,

Doing their bit to hold things together.