The continents had long been drifting close—
For hundreds of millions of years the sea
Had narrowed between each landmass coast to coast
Until the world became geography
Of one: great Pangea, the supercontinent
That gathered all the land the earth possessed
Into one mass from tropic to the bent
And frozen poles—east touching west,
South meeting north across the closing brine
Of shrinking oceans, mountain ranges thrust
Where plates collided into one long spine
Of rock from equator to the dust
Of arctic shore—and in the center lay
The greatest inland ever known:
A vast and arid heart where no sea spray
Could reach, where desert-red and stone
Defined the world for thousands of miles wide—
No ocean breeze, no monsoon rain could cross
The mountain ranges ringing every side
To soften the Pangean interior's loss
Of moisture—only the wildest swings
Of temperature from day to night remained,
The burning day, the freezing that night brings
When no ocean's warmth has been retained
Nearby—a world of extremes without
The ocean's moderating breath to calm
The temperature to something less devout
To killing heat and cold—a desert psalm
Of desolation sang across the heart
Of Pangea. But the small ones heard
A different sermon in it—for the art
Of being small is this: the word
Of desert is not death for those whose needs
Are small enough to fit between the stones,
Who find their food in every crack that feeds
On something—who can make their homes
From nothing but a crevice in the rock
And eat the things the large ones overlook:
The invertebrate, the insect stock
Needs not the wealth of river or of brook
To thrive—a fallen leaf, a fallen seed,
The bodies of the dead, the fungal mat—
This is enough for Neopter's creed,
And Pangea's great interior was that
And more: it was a continent of road
For those with wings to cross it with,
A highway wider than had ever glowed
With possibility, a smith
Of new biodiversity for those
Who could endure the crossing—Neopter
Spread his nations along every close
And narrow pass where scrub and juniper
Still clung to life—new orders found their place
In the arid interior of the one
Great land: the beetles multiplied in space
Where no competition had begun,
The termites of a later age took form
From proto-roach ancestors who tried
The dry interior's transforming storm
Of temperature and found inside
The rotting log and under every stone
A kingdom made of cellulose—the wood
That no vertebrate could eat alone
Was Neopter's inheritance and good
And endless bread. The ants would come
In far-off future chapters—but the seed
Of colony, the drum
Of eusocial living's creed
Was already beginning in the hymenoptera's
Ancestors who walked the Permian plain
And found in shared defense and shared endeavors
More survival than the lone's campaign.
And Arachnus crossed the Pangean road
As well—the spiders with their silk
Had tools of conquest that no other showed:
A web across the world, white milk
Of protein spun from spinnerets
Into a snare for anything that flew—
And in a world of insects, nothing gets
More profitable than a trap for new
Varieties of flying prey—wherever
Neopter's children spread new wings
And crossed the vast interior, the clever
Arachnus followed, stringing
His webs between whatever brush remained
Along the desert margins, hunting every
New arrival—predator ingrained
In the same great crossing, wary
And patient, eight-eyed in the dark.
So Pangea that seemed pure desolation—
That vast red heart with not a mark
Of ocean moisture—was a nation
Of possibilities for those too small
To need a river: the insect and the spider
Found in the supercontinent a hall
Wider than the world before, insider
Knowledge of what smallness means for those
Who search the cracks and corners of the earth:
That no geography can close
A kingdom to the ones of small enough girth
To enter it between the stones.
Honor the Pangean road that linked
All lands in one—that sent the small through zones
Of desolation and the world re-linked
Its biodiversity through legs and wings
Across the dry interior's great expanse—
The continent of one gives everything
A common stage for the evolving dance.