Evolution

Whilst at the used bookstore last week, we encountered a lovely hardcover book: A Treasury of the Familiar.  Copyrighted in 1942, it has a wonderful conglomeration of all sorts of well-known bits and pieces of literature, from short speeches of Abraham Lincoln, to Macbeth's soliloquy, to nursery rhymes and songs, to Edgar Allan Poe, and on and on and on.  Marvelous.

One poem in particular caught our attention:  Evolution by Langdon Smith.  It is vaguely reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics -- one of Herself's favorite books, that includes the romantic fantasy, The Distance of the Moon.  (We have mentioned this story before, here.)  Evolution is a lilting look at love over time, through cycles of life, death and rebirth over eons and eons.  It appeals to both the scientist and the romantic within our heart.

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then. 

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died; 
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death 
And crept into light again. 

Picture copyright 2012, 2013, Mediocria Firma. Used with gratitude.