That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”

- Poem XL
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

Along this strand opposite Holy Island
pebbles fit softly into the palm of my hand,
pebbles that spent their eternity rolling on the floors of seas,
smooth and silent.

Others, more ragged in texture, dragged themselves
through sand, rock — 
desperately missing the solidity of land.

Fossils cling to rocks, embedded trilobites,
wink in the waves,
snail shell swirls lie embossed in rock — 
all had lived
in the Jurassic or Cretaceous, fought hard for food,
driven to reproduce. Why? So that aeons later
a mere virus can bring mankind to its knees?

These wobbly evolutionary overlaps quickly dispose
of those who see a straight trajectory into the future
passing from the past into the present then on and on and on;
such mindless dtift lends credence to those who saw,
still see and forever will see, in the star of Bethlehem
a supernova, that wiped out, in seconds,
the most advanced, peaceful civilization this universe will ever know.

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