Poetry Friday: Rebecca Holmes

My daughter, Rebecca, is a physics and astronomy major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's also pursuing a creative writing minor. (I know! I love it.)

Rebecca has written non-fiction articles for Carolina Scientific, and recently, she had two poems accepted by the campus literary magazine, Cellar Door. I asked if she would share some new work with my blog readers, and she sent me these two stunners:

Living Fossils

I.

It doesn’t seem to belong to the past of this planet

with four hearts, two brains, a single testicle—

worm with a skull, dark embryo: the hagfish.

No child fascinated by dinosaurs could love it,

this living fossil, unchanged in 300 million years.

Not petrified, but preserved in the viscid flow

of time on the cold bed of the ocean,

so dark, so deep it escaped evolution

or was left behind: the round mouth turning like a gear,

forever the lensless eye.

II.

The saltwater crocodile is thriving in the coastal rivers

near Darwin, Australia, as dinosaurs burn on the roads

as fossil fuel. Long ago among the ferns, did an ancestor

pray for immortality? Now everything familiar

is dust and oil. A tagged crocodile leaves the coast,

swims far into the open ocean, sometimes reappears

hundreds of miles away—and sometimes vanishes.

Maybe his tag came loose and sank too deep for radios

to hear. Or maybe he paused among the waves, inhaled

the salt air once more and dove: deep down, out of time

to reptile Valhalla, to take his place among the ferns

being crushed to grease in the heart of the Earth.
                                                      ---Rebecca Holmes (all rights reserved)


Poetry Friday is hosted today by Becky at Becky's Book Reviews