Now hear of Dicyno, the beaked and tusked
And patient one, who fed the world through all
The late Permian age—who walked and brusked
Through every landscape from the great hall
Of tropical basin to the high
And arid plateau—who moved in herds
Of thousands through the Pangean sky-
Wide plains and said with every word
Of his abundant living: I am here.
I am the bread of this world. I am
The patient herbivore without a fear
Too large for my endurance—Dicyno's calm
Was legend in the Permian ecosystem:
Where others starved or fled the spreading dry,
Dicyno found a way to seize them—
The roots beneath the soil, the dry
And woody vegetation that no other
Herbivore could process—his beak
Was built for cropping, his fossil's brother
To the tortoise's efficient peak
Of grinding: no teeth but two great tusks
Projecting from the upper jaw
For digging roots and tearing at the husks
Of plants that other mouths left raw
And unattempted—a dietary monk
Who ate what others left, who found
In every desert margin, every drunk
And dying vegetation, ground
Still worth exploring for the root below.
The dicynodont became the most abundant
Large land vertebrate of any show
The Permian staged—redundant
Only in the sense that numbers vast
Were needed to sustain the pyramid
Of Gorgo's hunger—each one the last
Meal of something else, the grid
Of energy from plant to herbivore
To carnivore maintained by Dicyno's
Abundance—he was the store
Of the world's fuel, the provider's nose
Always to the ground, always the one
Who turned the sun's gift in plant to flesh
That others needed—in this way the sun
Itself walked through the ecosystem's mesh
As Dicyno moved from plant to prey.
There were hundreds of species in his line—
From rabbit-small to hippo-wide, each way
Of being Dicyno was a shrine
To the versatility of a single plan:
The beak, the tusk, the barrel body low
And close to the ground—from each began
A different niche, a different overflow
Of adaptation: the borrower of burrows
Who dug his den beside the termite mound,
The aquatic wader of the furrows
Of the slow Permian rivers, found
Half-sunk in mud; the dry-land wanderer
Who covered a hundred miles of red
Rock in a season, following the thunderer
Of monsoon's trail for the brief spread
Of green that followed any rain—
Dicyno was everywhere that the Permian
World put vegetation, every plain
And hillside of the supercontinent's span.
He was the sheep of the Permian—
The innocent abundance that supports
The wolf—the one whose death was plan
A of the ecosystem's courts
Of energy exchange—and he submitted
To this role without complaint or flight
Beyond what flight was useful, fitted
To his purpose, present in the light
Of each Permian dawn—the broad-backed herd
That crossed the plain at dawn was his,
And every track that follows after heard
The predator behind: this is
The world that works—the eaten and the eating
In their ancient dance of shaping each
The other—Gorgo's greeting
To Dicyno was the teach
Of every generation in the art
Of being faster, slightly, than the one
Behind you—the herd's panicking heart
Was Dicyno's education, sun
By sun and generation by generation.
Honor Dicyno who fed the world—
Who walked in every nation
And turned the desert's last unfurled
Green plant to flesh that the predator needed—
Who was the bread before the cup—
Whose patience and abundance seeded
The pyramid of life from bottom up.