The morning of the last day was like any other.
The sun rose over Laurasia and the warm
Cretaceous air received the light like a mother
Receiving a child—the familiar, the form
Of every morning for a hundred million years:
The mist rising from the river, the call
Of the hadrosaur's crest in the early frontiers
Of dawn, the pterosaur lifting from the wall
Of the cliff-side roost on the thermal's first
Ascending column of the morning heat—
The Cretaceous's last day was the unrehearsed
And ordinary continuation of the beat
Of life that knows nothing of its end.
In the forest, the flowering understory
Opened its petals to the pollinators' blend
Of wing and proboscis—the Cretaceous glory
Of the angiosperm-insect partnership
In full display: the bee arrived at dawn,
The butterfly followed, and the tulip-lip
Of the flower opened wider on the lawn
Of the forest floor for each visitor's touch.
Tyrannos woke hungry—as he always did—
And the morning's hunt began: the familiar clutch
Of scent and sight, the tracking of the hid
And browsing Ceratops in the scrubland,
The patient approach through the Angios cover,
The calculation of the strike—no husband
Of the energy, no careful lover
Of the caloric budget, but the raw
And inefficient killing-machine that burned
More calories than he could see—the maw
Of the apex predator who had learned
To eat enormously and often.
The Hadros herds moved south along the coast
In their annual migration, the coffin
Of the Cretaceous autumn—or the toast
Of the Cretaceous spring, for the greenhouse world
Had gentler seasons than our own—and the herd
Of a thousand hadrosaurs, their crests unfurled
In the morning light, bellowed every word
Of their rich vocabulary: the contact-call,
The danger-signal, the mother's low
And resonant locator for the small
And wandering infant in the herd's slow flow.
In the inland sea, Mosas surfaced to breathe—
The great monitor-jawed leviathan
Rising from the continental-shelf's wreath
Of warm water, and the meridian
Of the noonday sun caught his body's length
In the surface glitter—seventeen meters
Of the lizard-kin's oceanic strength
Before he dove again to the deeper theaters
Of his hunting.
Plesios hunted deeper still—
The four-flippered flier of the underwater,
Her long neck sweeping with the ancient skill
Of the sauropterygian's patient slaughter
Of the schooling fish—she had done this
Every day for a hundred and thirty million years
Of her lineage's continuity—the bliss
Of the hunting plesiosaur's career
Unchanged since the Jurassic dawn.
And in the evening—the very last—
The Mammos in his burrow looked upon
The setting sun and heard the vast
And ordinary night begin: the insects
Singing, the nocturnal mammals emerging
From their burrows to the complex texts
Of the nighttime ecosystem, the merging
Of the day shift and the night shift at the seam
Of dusk—the universal handoff
That the Mesozoic world had made a dream
Of reliability—and the final standoff
Between the stone and the planet was hours away.
Did any creature sense it? The birds, perhaps—
The magnetic-field perception of the day-
Old seabirds, the navigational maps
Written in their brains, might have registered
The stone's approach as a faint disturbance
In the magnetosphere—but history
Keeps no record of the natural observance
Of the approaching doom.
The last sunset
Was beautiful—as all Cretaceous sunsets were—
The greenhouse atmosphere's palette set
In reds and golds that would not recur
For ten million years.
And then the night.
The last night of the Mesozoic world.
And in the south, a growing point of light
In the sky, where no star had ever swirled
Before—growing, brightening, falling—
The stone arrived.