Bones

On a sundrenched road-trip
To The Land of Enchantment,
I met a boy who held with the greatest conviction
That the fossil record
(The plethora of prehistoric carcasses
That barter bone for mineral deposits
In the great sedimentary stock exchange)
Was the product of demonic intervention—

That pitch-forked, ruddy imps,

Masquerading as Roswellian extraterrestrials,
Had taken to their silvered crafts
With the sole purpose of planting
Behemoth bones beneath
The rippling, rainbow layers
Of the earth
To support the heretical theories
Of Charles’ Darwin
And like-minded men.

The boy smirked,

Triumphantly expecting me to acknowledge,
That he had dashed Darwin
Into oblivion.
That the God of his fathers
Had prefabricated our earth
Like a ready-made mobile-home
For his beloved simian play-things:
Complete with football stadiums,
Cold draft beer,
And fried chicken wings,
Popping as hot oil
Pushed the skin further
From grease-scorched muscular tissue.

At that moment,
Palming my face like a patient father
In the crushed-velvet pews
Of this backwards, backwoods church house,
I looked up
And regarded the cliff-face
Not ten dust-blown meters
From the cherry-wood windowpane
Set with glass crackled
With the bombardment of eons-old pebbles,
And nodded my consent to Nietzsche.

But—
There is something to be said
For the herculean leaps and bounds
(Like pole-vaulters
Sailing over the malt-o-meal sands
Of logic, science,
Or any shred of rationality)
To which ignorance will set its stride
When faced with fact.

And here,
In this church,
With the crooked smile of this boy
And his call for a crusade against reason,
I stand slack-jawed and amazed.

But the cliff-face shrugs,

Conceding more dust and pebbles
To erosion’s howling breathe,
Untroubled by a prepubescent monkey’s
Unwillingness to acknowledge his age.
Knowing that one day
(Just as his forbearers),
He will be tilled into the topmost layers,
And ages upon ages later
Some other idiot will squawk
The ignorant incantation
Sure to render his screaming skeleton silent as well.