Then—after the harrowing, after the long
Silence of the poisoned world—the green.
Not all at once: no resurrection song
Announced it—the first was not seen
By anyone who could report it—only
A spore landing on a bare stone slope
In early Triassic morning, the lonely
And unremarkable arrival of hope
In the form of a bryophyte—a moss—
Whose spore had ridden out the acid years
In cryptobiosis, the death-that-is-not-loss,
Waiting—and the stone's first tears
Of mineral were the feast it needed.
The moss spread slowly, barely visible
Against the gray—but where it seeded,
The soil began—the invisible
Partnership of moss and mineral turned
Rock surface into the beginnings of
A substrate where the next seed could be earned
A place to root—and so the love
Of life reasserted itself in increments
Too small to witness but too vast
To stop—the Triassic's sentiments
Were those of rebuilding from the last
Foundation stone of any possible world:
One moss on one bare rock in the first
Year of the new era, unfurled
From its own dormancy—the worst
Was over, and the green was coming back.
Conifera came next—her seeds
Had waited in the soil through the attack
Of acid rain, her cone-seeds' creeds
Of dormancy preserved through the long dying
As they had always waited for the right
Conditions—and the right conditions lying
In the early Triassic morning light
Were only this: less poison, less heat,
A little water in the rain
That was less acid—that was sweet
Enough for her to germinate again.
And from the survivors—Lystro and his kind,
Cynos from the burrow, the few
And battered remnants—evolution's mind
Began again the patient work of new
Diversity: into every empty niche
The survivors radiated—Cynos
Found a world with no established rich
Predator to contend with, and Cynos
Explored every ecological space
Available—small hunters, burrowers,
And in the fullness of a later race
Of time, the first true mammals—the harbingers
Of warm blood complete, milk given freely
To the young, fur against the cold—
All this was coming, all of it clearly
Written in the survivors' bold
Genetic memory of what Cynos
Was already nearly—only needing
Time and empty niches, the disclose
Of opportunity, the seeding
Of a new age.
And in the sea—
For the ocean too was healing,
Slowly, painfully, the chemistry
Returning to the kinder feeling
Of less acid, more dissolved oxygen,
The sulfide fading as volcanism
Declined—and in the new oxygen
The ray-finned fish, the great schism
From the other fish that Actinus
Had made long ago in the coal swamp's
Abundance—Teleosteos the most
Numerous of all his clans—
Began to seize the empty ocean:
The teleosts, who had been modest
In the Permian sea, their notion
Of diversity modest
Beside the great marine invertebrates
That had dominated—now they found
The ocean empty, found the fates
Of those great invertebrates had drowned
In the acid—and they filled it:
Into every depth and current,
Into every niche that spilled its
Former occupant, the current
Rush of teleost radiation began—
The largest vertebrate explosion
In the history of the ocean ran
Through the Triassic's slow erosion
Of emptiness back into abundance—
The ray-finned fish would ultimately
Become half of all vertebrate redundance
On the planet, the intimate
And universal presence in every water
On the earth—but it began here,
In the aftermath, as the daughter
Of resilience always does: unclear,
Unpromising, small—a few survivors
Eating in an empty sea
And finding, as all true revivers
Find, that emptiness is opportunity
Dressed in gray.
The first Easter of the Triassic
Had no witnesses who understood it—
Only the ordinary, the classic
Persistence of life that could not
Be told from simple hunger, from the bare
Mechanics of survival—and yet
This too is resurrection: the return
Of green to the bare hill, the wet
And patient moss on limestone, the fern
Uncurling from the ash-soil,
Lystro walking in the first
Good morning of the new age—the toil
Of rebuilding without knowing
That you are rebuilding, just alive
And going forward, going, going
Toward whatever life can give.
Honor the Triassic morning—the gray
Light of the new world filling slowly with
The green of those who lived—each day
A little less of death, a little myth
Becoming history: the history of life
That always finds a way to be again
After every fire and every knife
Of mass extinction—the refrain
Of green returning, of the sea
Clearing, of the first small mammal
Looking at the morning and seeing free
And empty opportunity.
New world, new age—the Triassic's cradle
Rocking life back into being.