Horizons, by Roy Beckemeyer

A Permian reptile's footprint, Noble County, Oklahoma. Photo by Roy Beckemeyer.

Horizons 

"Back toward the time when
the world, without footprints, broke open."
- Ginger Murchison, from her poem, "On Stone Mountain"

A backhoe paws its single front
     leg onto gray shale, shatters, pulls,
breaks, delaminates, lays waste

the traces of  Edaphosaurus
     dog-paddling hot, briny estuaries
under equatorial Permian sun,

rips the pages of ancient stone
     texts, devastates the cuneiform 
signatures of reptilian claws, 

the clay tablets of millennia 
     of evolution's accounts: the world, 
with footprints, broken open.

​Roy Beckemeyer

Roy Beckemeyer lives in Wichita, Kansas His poems have appeared in a variety of print and on-line literary journals including Beecher's Magazine, Chiron Review, Coal City Review, Dappled Things, Flint Hills Review, I-70 Review, Kansas City Voices, The Light Ekphrastic, The Midwest Quarterly, The North Dakota Quarterly, The Syzygy Poetry Review, and Zingara. His book of poetry, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Review and Press, Lawrence, KS, 2014) was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He won the Beecher's Magazine  Poetry Contest in 2014, and the Kansas Voices Poetry Award in 2016.