Dancing With Dinosaurs

Dancing With Dinosaurs

1.
Before we came to earth,
before the birds had come,
there were dinosaurs,
their feathers were a bright idea
that came this way--

see: two tiny creatures weighing
two ounces each keep quiet among
the ferns observe bright-eyed
the monsters tear each other
and disappear; these two watch
from the edge of what, some fifty billion spires
of the cooling earth ahead, will be
called Nova Scotia--now, with reptilian
whistles they look southward as
Pan-Gaea breaks apart and lets
a young Atlantic send its thunder crashing
up to the pines where they cling
with miniscule bodies in a tossing wind,
September night in the chilly rain and
they sing, as they spread
small wings to flutter out above
surf-spray and rise to
twenty-thousand feet on swirling
winds of a passing cold front that lift
them over the grin of sharks southeastward
into sun and all day winging under him
pass high above the pink and snowy beaches
of Bermuda, flying through zero cold
and brilliance into darkness,
then into moonlight over steel
Leviathans with the mimic pines
that calm them down to rest and die--
they bear
southeast steadily but the Trade Winds
come and float them curving
back southward over the Windward Islands
and southwestward into the marine and scarlet of
their third day coming down
to four thousand feet still winging over
Tobago, descending till
the scaled waves stretch and widen
into the surf of Venezuela
and they drop through moonlight
down to perch on South America's shoulders,
having become the Male and Female Singers,
having put on their feathers, and survived.

2.
When I was named
a Thunder person, I was told:
here is a being
of whom you may make your body
that you may live to see old age: now
as we face the drum
and dance shaking the gourds, this gourd
is like a rainbow of feathers lightly
fastened with buckskin,
fluttering as the gourd is shaken.

The eagle feathers I
have still not earned, it is
the small birds only
whose life continues on the gourd,
whose life continues in our dance,
that flutter as the gourd is rattled and
we dance to honor on a sunbright day
and in the moonbright night
the little girl being brought in,
becoming one of us
as on a war done for me,
for each of us who dance,
the small birds only, who have given
their bodies that a small girl
may live to see old age.
I have called them here
to set them into song
who made their rainbow bodies long before
we came to earth,
who learned song and flight, became
beings for whom the infinite sky
and trackless ocean are
a path to spring.
Now they will sing and we
are dancing with them, here.


Carter Devard.......from How The Songs Come Down