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

Poetry Friday: This is not a test

put down your multiple choice, the answer
is not ‘all of the above’ and this is not
just a cheap styrofoam practice prototype
with notes in the margin and plans for
improvement, we are not a mistake,
we are not dross leftover neatly labeled
and filed away for later

this matters and there won’t be a later,
living like lizards under rocks waiting for
the sun to come out but this is already daylight,
creep out and push your nose through the
grass, look around and dig in and make this matter

this is not just a test, this is today and real
and wonderful and harsh and joyful, every
shadow and syllable and keystroke and lizard
tail and breath in the dark and failing heartbeat,
every action potential and argon atom, and
the sun will never come out but we don’t have
to stay under rocks, this is already daylight

there are already stars, we are already worn
out and breathing and beautiful, every lover
and horror and diamond matters singularly

---by Rebecca Holmes (all rights reserved)

This is my daughter. She's been teaching me that "this is not a test" since the day she was born.

Poetry Friday roundup is at Check It Out