65 million years ago, a meteor named Chicxulub struck Mesoamerica, wiping out 95 percent of the living things in North America. The first species to propogate the sterile clay was an ancestor of the Malaysian Climbing Fern that now covers entire islands in the South Pacific.
North America was almost entirely covered in climbing fern for tens of thousands of years.
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We are the flight which is the repose between two dances.
We are the weavers. Our eyes are on our legs.
We bore with our tap root. We whiten the sea
when we breach above her to the moon's face.
We hugged the pointless hills to ourselves,
lance-leaved, multi-petaled, made them.
Under our black eye-spotted whirring backs,
under the hooves that buoy us over cousin grass,
we have changed everything.
It was deep and we dug.
It was lofty and we lifted.
It was many and we multiplied.
It was lovely and we took shapes for us
that are the single loveliness forever.
it was winter and we died.
It was cold in the world and we waited.
The glacier was the night.
It bore its ghosts and stars.
It was the strange time when our mother
turned her head and slept, and wept
in her sleep tears that hardened
in the moon and crushed us.
We could not leave her. We dreamed
what we might be when the bad time left us.
Cliffbrake, birch, red cedar, saxifrage,
wolf's claw, moonwort, bleeding heart,
bloodroot, bloodroot.
We are the glacier's daughters.
We rip the rock.
We grow fingers where our hearts would be.
We work down, gripping, grinding stone to soil,
squeezing green from dark where nothing
moved since mountain danced up from the sea.
Two fists hammer her, the sleeping mother.
Father is the night and fury. We are the second.
We are fire in green gloves, wind in a cup of flowers,
bulging what the snow beat flat.
Green, the glacier's daughters, giving back,
atoning for our father, for the sins of God.
Rocks wears us in its nakedness.
Its shame is turned to forests.
Its wounds run green and frill.
Climb this battleground, this withered rock,
Among your sisters who have labored longer:
toothwort, ironwood, hart's tongue, bracken.
We are first-born at the task, recovering,
amending all with sinew where our hearts were.
We fight for the garden lost by God's turned back,
against sleet, snow, the intolerable solstice,
ever the ice-hill looming with its bastinade of stars.
We have made ourselves from nothing.
We cling to the cliffs and pity them,
pity the brief oaks their beauty, how they
out-grip God and how the least wears them away.
We sigh to the hurt hills, "Pilgrim..."
We are the foundation. Trees taste and stay,
lavish trees heavy from south with their clouds of flowers,
their arms rising to the sun as if they planned
to climb forever, the roots
forgetting as they pour toward heaven.
We come first in spring before they shade us.
We are green through winter, remembering
cold beside which this cold is a needle
in a sea of ice. We are the glacier's daughters.
Grandfather fire is in us. Grandmother, the abiding.
We reach out and take. We have
turned winter into world again.
We fetch this hill from nothing.
God howls and we suck him down.
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