Today's poem is by Catherine Jagoe

Memento Mori
       

On the way back from a family funeral
twelve hundred miles away, I have a layover
at Chicago O'Hare, and scurrying through Concourse B
of Terminal 1 on the lookout for somewhere
to grab a bite to eat, I pass a dinosaur,
its gargantuan black skeleton looming
over me, its long, long neck reaching
the rafters of the domed glass ceiling,
gazing sightless at the planes parked on the tarmac,
and I know from Jurassic Park it's a brachiosaurus
though there's no plaque, no information
on where it came from, when it roamed this earth,
and no one stops or even seems to see it,
occupied as they are with making their flights,
putting their shoes on and liquids away after exiting
the security checkpoints with their X-
ray machines and packed conveyor belts,
the United terminal a hive of harried
humans and I stand under the creature's
Brobdingnagian ribs, so delicately curved and tapered,
think of it craning its neck to chomp the treetops,
disconsolate perhaps that they're not here, and peering
down at the pygmy shrew-sized mammals at its feet—
its ribs now holding air and space that once held muscle,
sinew, lungs, a massive heart—this small-skulled
herbivore, peacefully cropping the forests
whose foliage and trunks compacted for billennia became
the coal that fired our industry, the steel,
steam power, trains, that opened up the West, the world
all for our taking, so now we jet in mere hours
over oceans, burning the sludge of oceans past,
black like the painted reproduction of these bones
unearthed a century ago, our flying powered by fossil
fuels, the very thing we passengers are all engaged in
the reason why we're fated to be swallowed up
by fire and floods, wiped out as surely
as the dinosaurs, yet here we are, hastening our end,
heedless of the skeleton's stark message,
and I reflect upon this fact later at a writers'
retreat it takes me half a tank of gasoline
to reach, in a library with wing-backed chairs
beneath a black and loudly ticking clock.

Copyright © 2024 Catherine Jagoe All rights reserved
from Praying to the God of Small Things
Kelsay Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission