The mountain shed its skin in fire
Ten thousand centuries ago.
Now lichen, in its ashen choir,
Writes names the summit doesn’t know.

The river doesn’t know it writes.
The glacier cannot mourn its dead.
Yet both have etched their last good nights
In script the living leave unread.

The light that left a dying star
Ten thousand years before your birth
Arrives to find the door ajar,
And spills across the kitchen earth.

The heart pumps forward, not reverse.
It cannot stop what it compelled.
We are the elegy and verse—
The wound that writes what love withheld.

The iron in your blood was forged
In collapsed suns before your birth.
The debt is old. Their cores disgorged
What you became, this blood and earth.

The geese fly south on hollow bones.
Their innermost eye knows the way.
They navigate by cues unknown,
By something no one’s tongue can say.

The trilobite didn’t ask to be
Pressed into stone for us to find.
Nor did we ask for eyes to see—
We’re walking fossils, strangers to our mind.

The dead outnumber us. They wait
In sediment, in ice, in peat.
We walk on them. We calculate
Our brief trajectories of heat.

And when the heat has left the bone,
We’ll join the lichen on the stone.
The sediment will take us in.
The Earth will never know we’ve been.