Ryland Shengzhi Li

James Farm Ecological Preserve

So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds…. And God saw that it was good…. And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas’ . . . – Genesis 1:21-22

The broken carapaces of horseshoe crabs litter the fen. In a month or two, they will once more swarm the Delaware beaches.

These are the living fossils whose ancestors swam the seas four hundred and forty million years ago, long before homo sapiens walked the earth. Long before hominids even, primates, mammals, they hail from an aeon we can only excavate and imagine.

Yesterday I saw a lithograph. A mantis inside a bird inside a fish inside a horse inside a tree standing in water in an orange sky inside a wood frame next to a plaque: Fossil, 1998.

I wonder if one day when all that remains of us are fossils and artifacts and some alien species contemplates our ruin and excavation, will the descendants of horseshoe crabs still swarm the summer beaches and be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters of the sea?

what is time
in this tricolor world
of dun marsh
green pines
blue sound and sky?

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About the Author

Ryland Shengzhi Li (李晟之) is a poet and environmental lawyer living in Northern Virginia, USA. Poetry teaches him how to pay attention and to see the beauty and interdependence of all things.

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