After the fire, silence.
Not the silence of peace—
The silence of the empty room, the closed
Theater after the audience's release
Has gone and only broken chairs disclosed
The weight of what had happened—the Permian
Earth in the immediate extinction's wake
Was not recovered land but the meridian
Of horror: everything still at stake
And nothing yet decided—the air
Still poisonous with methane and the last
Of sulfur's throat-burning—every bare
And rocky hillside scoured by the past
Months of acid rain, the soil stripped
Of its organic layer, the chemistry
Of the topsoil long since ripped
Away—bare rock, bare clay, the sea
Of mudstone and the desert's gray
Expanse of what had been the Permian plain.
And over all of this, the gray
And silent reign of fungi, the champagne
Of the dead—for when the primary
Producers fail, when photosynthesis
Has ceased across the geography
Of continents, the kingdom in analysis
That profits is the one that eats
The dead: the fungi rose in the silence
After the green—in fossil layers, sheets
Of fungal spores replace the reliance
On pollen and plant spores that had marked
Every layer of the Permian above—
A spike of fungal abundance, parked
At the extinction boundary—a shove
Of death-eaters into the ecological
Vacuum—the world's composters,
Who had always worked biological
Renewal in the background, the quiet rosters
Of decomposition—now they were
The only large-scale living presence
In the aftermath, the only stir
Of metabolism across the immense
And empty continents—the fungal world
Ate what the dying left behind,
Ate the fallen forests, the unfurled
And rotting bodies, every kind
Of organic matter in the wreckage—
And slowly, through their eating,
They began to return the breakage
To the soil, composting and completing
The cycle that allows the next life in:
For soil is only dead things processed
Through the fungal network's discipline
Into the mineral and the rest
That plants can use again—the fungi
Harrowed hell in the literal sense
Of harrowing: turned the dry and hungry
Dead soil over, broke the dense
And compacted rock-surface with their acids,
Made ready what the green would need
To return—the undertakers, the placid
Workers of the interval between the seed
Of old world and the seed of new.
And through this poisoned world, some few
Survived—not the great or the well-known
Or the celebrated—the small, the burrowed,
The ones who ate the dead—the stone
And scale of anything that could
Process the least nutritious meal
In the most efficient way—Cynos
In his burrow, sealed
From the worst of the surface, woke
Into a world reduced to nothing
But possibility—he spoke
No language of lament, only breathing
The gradually clearing air above
His burrow-entrance, emerging into gray
Light and empty landscape—and the love
Of living drove him to the day
Regardless of its emptiness.
Lystro too—the dicynodont
Who somehow had survived, the less
Selective eater, the defiant front
Of Dicyno's lineage—Lystro found
In the post-extinction world a strange
And solitary abundance: the ground
Was his entirely—the full range
Of the Triassic early land was Lystro's
Without competition, without predator—
The first years of the Triassic's throes
Were his inheritance—the corridor
Of empty continent walked by one small
Beaked herbivore who ate whatever grew,
Who asked no more of life than the simple call
Of root and tuber—Lystro knew
Only that he was hungry and alive
And that was sufficient—in the hell
Of the aftermath, to merely survive
Is the whole achievement, and that spell
Of bare survival is not lesser than
The glorious Permian peak—it is
Perhaps more—the one who can
Endure the harrowing is
The one who will inherit
The next world entire.
Let us honor the harrows of hell—
The ones who kept the fires
Of life alive through the spell
Of silence—the fungi composting,
The survivors burrowing below,
Lystro in the gray world coasting
Forward on the simple need to go
On living—they did not know
They were the seeds of everything
That followed—they only know
The hunger and the living.
That is enough. That has always been enough.