For Monday’s VerseLove on Ethical ELA, host Brittany Saulnier extended this invitation: “Today, write a poem inspired by science and perhaps, whimsy…The challenge is to ensure the reader can simultaneously glimpse the scientific concept you were inspired by and a universal truth.”

As always, my thoughts turn to nature. It is always teaching; are we heeding its lessons? Nature’s messages don’t come on words but from its own rhythms and coding. I write much of birds. It is said that they are they last living dinosaurs. Maybe even now they are the impetus, in their always-inspirational way, for my digging deep to see what I might find…

Existential Dance

sea and earth
earth and sea
complicated
choreography

streams of movement
building higher
freeform deposits
wetter, drier

life rising, falling
layer on layer
it’s all timing, timing,
the dragon-slayer

everything alive
to remain, must eat
until nothing remains
but remains under feet 

strata with volumes 
lined on a shelf
stories kept secret
unto itself

sea and earth
earth and sea
consolidated
choreography

streams of movement
releasing the store
freeform deposits
washing ashore

when miners come
millennia later
scratching their heads
no translator

for what they’re seeing
drawn from the earth
looking for phosphate
to be stunned by girth

of ancient teeth
from a creature long gone
scientific name:

Megalodon

(meaning “big tooth”)
—what great irony
this turns out to be
last laugh of earth and sea

monster-shark teeth
unearthed in a way
with a side effect:
workers’ tooth decay

everything alive
to remain, must eat
until nothing remains
but remnants…of teeth

sea and earth
earth and sea
conspiratorial
choreography

Carcharocles Megalodon Tooth. 5.4 inches long, 4.4 inches wide.
Excavated from Lee Creek Mine, Aurora, North Carolina, USA.
Public domain.

My grandparents lived on the outskirts of tiny Aurora, North Carolina, home to the largest phosphate mining and chemical plant in the world (miningtechnology.com archive). In the 1970s, prior to the establishment of the Aurora Fossil Museum, “rejects” or unwanted gravel material from mines were scattered on the many dirt roads around the area. As a child I walked in these rejects along the old dirt road by my grandparents’ home, finding bits of coral skeleton, shark’s teeth, possibly some Megalodon teeth, and fossilized eardrums and vertebrae of log-extinct creatures. Now visitors can dig through this material in the fossil pits at the Museum, which will host its annual Fossil Festival May 26-29.

The April 2023 edition of Our State Magazine contains an article by Katie Schanze about Aurora and its fossils: the area “produces the most prolific fossil record of Miocene (2.3 million to 5.3 million years ago) and Pliocene (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago) marine life on the Atlantic coast.”

It was by chance that I stumbled across references elsewhere stating that one of the detrimental effects of phosphate mining is tooth decay from prolonged exposure to fumes of chemicals used in the process. What irony, I thought, tooth decay caused by mining something used as fertilizer to grow food, while simultaneously finding preserved teeth of one of the mightiest sea predators ever to have lived…which likely went extinct due to loss of food.

*******

with thanks to Brittany Saulnier for the poetic inspiration on Ethical ELA
and to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
and Our State: Celebrating North Carolina, Vol. 90, No. 11