Exhibit

How far it’s come, epochs

and continents. Before man

deified the lightning’s fire,

its tuba heart had clunked

from the cage of its body.

Before mother clasped infant,

on guard against the tall grass

transformed by night,

it shit great cairns, humped,

they think, some clumsy way.

Now we travel hours

to gather round its bones

and sense how something’s changing

in the air, under those same stars

that now, like it, we’ve named.