The following is excerpted from ARCHAI by John David Ebert:
This book can be ordered here: https://www.createspace.com/7099675
- carboniferous pastoral
…an explosion of riotous green shrapnel
bursting atop row after row
of spindle thin fern trees
which the broken earth
has shoved up with vertebral force
at the sun
to cleave it with chemical arrows…
towering stalks of spiny lepidodendrons
flanked by stumpy ferns
ropy crenellated fronds
with serrate edges
ancient sigillaria
its bark filigreed with honeycombed hexagons
bamboo thin calamites
with segmented stalks capped by horsetail heads
immense psaronius
splayed with palm like fronds
and flanked by mad green armies of low ferns
and medullosan trunks with tiny glittering knife leaves
and round pulpy seeds
that flourish upon the wasted earth
here
the sun is cut apart
into thick slats
that razor their way
through the foliage
and fall into the stagnant swamps
in lemon yellow slices
where they join the mirrored sky
and disappear into the murky liquid
every now and again
the algal surface of this lagoon
is disturbed
by the huge olive skulls
of leathery reptiles
which snap their jaws
with ivory yellow teeth
at the plague of rampant dragonflies hunting above them
blue and yellow thoraxes
bulbous red hemispheric eyes
and flashing translucent wings
gigantic
and they lift tiny pink lizards from the shore
and steal away with them
among the fronds
to feast near the cluttered remains
of lizard skulls discarded in the branches
from previous meals
one of the dragonflies has been caught
in the web of a giant black spider
which has it crucified to a tree
and is presently working hard to remove its head
with its mandibles
shoals of yellow black micro lizards
scuttle up the trunk of a nearby clubmoss
where an army of newly hatched red and green spiders
are busy dismantling the carcass of another larger blue lizard
its sides heaving like a bellows with its last gulps of precious air
as it lies on its back
viewing the forest upside down
while the lifeblood drains out of it
and its vision dims
in a brown pool near the lagoon
a nest of eel like creatures
writhes
at the edge of the silver shoreline
where a lumbering ophiacodon
with striped scaly skin
has crawled up from the depths
and chews noisily on the carcass of a giant millipede
elsewhere three enormous scorpions
fight over the poisoned body
of a mottled amphibamus
lunging and snapping at each other
with articulate shearing claws
as the immobilized creature stiffens and dies
and in the blue haze where the curvature of the earth
ruptures through the tangled canopy of trees
at the line of the horizon
a single lone clubmoss is alight
and blazes quietly in the distance against a riotous
and corrupt wall of green that surrounds it
rivers of tiny beige scorpions exit from the tree
and stream off into the dense vegetation
as the oily smoke blackens the air
and bleaches the sky
the scorpion horde streams past the
empty skeleton
of a proterogyrinus
its archaic bankrupt skull
squirming with a nest of infant snakes
inside it
near the foot of the burning tree
their limegreen mother
has wandered into the nest of hard shelled eggs
of a lizard named westlothiana
—an early amniote—
and presently has her jaws wrapped around one of the eggs
when the mother lizard returns to her nest
she will find that it has been decimated by the snake
we leave the scene here
for the jungle darkens
with the onset of night
as the liquid sun melts
behind the horse tails
and spiky fronds of the clubmosses
wasted and dying
at the edge of the bleeding brown earth
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