Rodinia

She trailed her fraying skirts through Mirovian waters,
kicking up the new shallow seas and stirring life
but barren herself with hard ultraviolet
and supercontinental glaciation.
That was before
the beginning of the long drift that separated
daughter-continents and split the ocean so that
he held one hemisphere in each arm—
before she died, dismembered and reassembled
under a new name, Pannotia.
By then,
she understood nakedness. She wore icy armor
and a delicate fur of algae and lichens.
It wasn't enough. Pannotia had to die as well.
Short-lived for a supercontinent, she was quartered
after only sixty million years.
Successor Pangaea
came with everything we expect: proto-mammals,
vast fern forests whose remains still seam
her children's flesh with black. For she too died,
fragments spinning dizzily about the globe, driving
mountains up past the very atmosphere.
Rodinia's
ancient bones, restored to primeval nudity
kiss hard vacuum in unfiltered sunlight.

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