Joanne Esser
Future Fossils
The shape of paper, calcified
like a snail shell into rock
that they’ll unearth after centuries
could be anything:
candy wrapper, marriage license,
magazine ad for a perfume or a car,
teenage song lyrics filled with angst,
Shakespeare’s own notes.
They’ll all be the same
in time. Our marks on the planet
just a blink in the universe’s eye,
the I of it gone.
What will be the evidence of us?
When what we’ve made turns to stone,
when our words fade to smudges,
then to blank sheets of pulp?
What now seems indelible
will disappear, our desperate
pleas to our children, “Listen! Listen!
Remember this!” carried off
like birdsong in a windy woods.
Yet how we love it, all
this world, and how fervid
we are to tell of it
with undeniable fire,
enough to light up the sky
before it all goes black.
Even knowing of the inevitable
erasure, we can’t stop
our hands from making the marks.
I will name it all
and write it again and again
even as sunset, infant, lilac and want,
purple, sour, mountain and mother
erode to alphabet fragments,
then to bits of nothing,
our fossils imprinted with
none of its beautiful heat.
Future Fossils
The shape of paper, calcified
like a snail shell into rock
that they’ll unearth after centuries
could be anything:
candy wrapper, marriage license,
magazine ad for a perfume or a car,
teenage song lyrics filled with angst,
Shakespeare’s own notes.
They’ll all be the same
in time. Our marks on the planet
just a blink in the universe’s eye,
the I of it gone.
What will be the evidence of us?
When what we’ve made turns to stone,
when our words fade to smudges,
then to blank sheets of pulp?
What now seems indelible
will disappear, our desperate
pleas to our children, “Listen! Listen!
Remember this!” carried off
like birdsong in a windy woods.
Yet how we love it, all
this world, and how fervid
we are to tell of it
with undeniable fire,
enough to light up the sky
before it all goes black.
Even knowing of the inevitable
erasure, we can’t stop
our hands from making the marks.
I will name it all
and write it again and again
even as sunset, infant, lilac and want,
purple, sour, mountain and mother
erode to alphabet fragments,
then to bits of nothing,
our fossils imprinted with
none of its beautiful heat.
Joanne Esser lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota and write poetry and nonfiction. She has also been a teacher of young children for over thirty years. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University and published a chapbook of poems, "I Have Always Wanted Lightning," with Finishing Line Press in 2012. Her work appears in Water-Stone, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Slant, and Under the Sun, among other places.