Daniel G. Fitch - Shortened

Around that rock,
around that star,
we spent many days
and later on, our nights as well
staring into the so-called face of god:
as the features congealed and formed,
sending our many machines down to
crawl through chaos on the sliding plates,
burning and terraforming at the edges
of our own (personal) hells above and below,
the angry volcanoes spidering out great
solidifying stone that one day will be the sands.
We should dream, but still we sit awake
in orbit, a black refusal to engage.
The cells now multiply; the fish climb
back and forth from the oceans of time;
and finally apes send their fragile metals
towards our stars, our home undetected, but
we end up somehow
shortened
under that long sun,
enslaved to a past we no longer remember,
the target moving, the endpoint not
yet fixed in our predictions; to lose faith as
the planet’s curve decays and grows
warmer still. The life grows so fast
it chokes itself. I tell you for certain, now:
This age is a place we did not
choose to call home. A coin
thrown down for luck at last into
the doctrine of eternal recursion,
with the sand looping over and over
in the shoreline’s shifting waves,
the civilization’s biome long gone,
but still we float unseen
above the sky and
refuse to sink
long-gone toes into
that well-worn sand.