Then the Atlantic opened, and the fire
Ran north and south along the cracking seam
Of Pangaea's breaking body—the entire
Central rift erupted in a steam
And basalt flood that rivaled the Siberian
Eruption of the Permian's final days—
The CAMP volcanism, another Stygian
And geological catastrophe, ablaze
Across eleven million square kilometers
Of flood basalt—the earth repeated what
It knew: the deep convection's heated meters
Of magma rising, finding every cut
And weakness in the crust, and pouring through.
The script was familiar: carbon first,
The warming—then the sulfur in the blue
And poisoned sky—the acid rain that burst
On forests that had only recently
Recovered from the Permian acid bath—
The trees went brown again, went frequently
To nothing, and the carbon cycle's math
Collapsed for the second time in thirty million years.
In the sea, the acid came again—
The pH falling, and the ancient fears
Of carbonate dissolution, and the pain
Of creatures whose shells were built from the mineral
That acid water dissolves—the corals
And the brachiopods, the funeral
Repeated for the reef-builders, the morals
Of the Permian unlearned by an earth
That cannot learn, that simply does
What the mantle's heat dictates—the birth
And death of worlds is the geological buzz
Of a planet that does not think.
On land,
Cruros' mighty rauisuchians fell:
The four-legged, heavy, crocodile-planned
Archosaurs who had held the Triassic spell
Of lowland dominion—gone. The phytosaurs
Who had worn the crocodilian mask before
The crocodile existed—closed doors
On their entire lineage, every shore
And river they had haunted now was empty.
The aetosaurs, the armored herbivores
Of Cruros' line, whose plated backs had been free
Of any predator's tooth—these patient stores
Of walking armor were no proof against
The atmospheric poison and the heat.
Thirty percent of all families were fenced
Out of the future—not the clean, complete
Annihilation of the Permian's ninety-six
Percent of marine species—this was lesser,
A middling death, a thinning of the mix—
But for those who died, no lesser, no lesser
Than any death has ever been.
And yet—
For those who survived, the world that opened
Was vast beyond imagining—the debt
Of death paid forward as the living happened
Upon a planet swept of competition:
Every river empty of the phytosaur,
Every lowland free of rauisuchian's rendition
Of the apex predator—the floor
Was clear, and Deinos walked onto it.
The dinosaurs, who had been upland runners,
Marginal, small, surviving on the grit
Of scrubland and the edges—now the stunners
Of the new Jurassic world—they filled
The empty niches with an explosive speed
That even the Cambrian would have thrilled
To match: into every lowland, every reed-
Bank, every river-valley, every coast,
The dinosaurs radiated, and the crown
That Cruros had worn was given to the host
Of Avemeta's children—hand-me-down
From the elder to the younger, as the world
Decreed through the merciless selection
Of who survived—and the banners unfurled
Of the Jurassic's new direction
Were all dinosaurian.
In the sea,
The Ichthyos survived—diminished, fewer,
But still swimming in the Tethys, free
To continue their dolphin-mimicry's pure
And ancient form. And Nothros' children stirred
Toward the deeper water, and the paddle-limbed
Descendants of the sauropterygians heard
The ocean calling them to fill the brimmed
And empty niches of the post-extinction sea.
And Cruros' humblest children—the small
Crocodilian ancestors—these were free
To claim the rivers for their own, the call
Of Cruros answered by his least:
The modest, the amphibious, the meek
Inheritors who survived the beast
Of volcanism by being too small to seek
And too flexible to fail.
This is the second Easter:
The death that is not final, the loss
That is the door to something greater—
The volcanic fire, the acid rain's cross
Borne by the Triassic world, and the resurrection
That followed: dinosaur, plesiosaur,
Crocodile, and mammal—each direction
Of the future opened from this floor
Of death, and the world that came was richer
For the dying that preceded it.
Honor the second extinction—it was no pitcher
Of mercy, and no comfort in the grit
Of dying—but the life that followed proved
That even the second death can be a door
To something the old world had not yet moved
Toward—and the Jurassic's mighty roar
Was born in the silence of the dying Triassic's last breath.