--- B .  D I E T R I C H

Over four billion years of Grace, and then what?
In the heart of the Yucatan, its deep
crater, down  below the boundary between
thunder lizard and thunder god, between
the laying down

of one discarded mantle and another,
there is that which we will never recover,
that which set our planet reeling like a bell.
In the year sixty-six, Josephus described a sword
hung over Jerusalem.

June twenty-fifth, Twelfth Century, five monks
watch the moon's upper horn split in two, spout
flame.  And Montezuma, and Giotto...
The end of empires, the beginnings of kingdoms,
heavenly ones, on Earth.

Harbingers.  Heartbreak.  A Siberian fireball.
Dead trees, dead dinosaurs, dead, Tunguskan air.
From Chicxulub to Arizona, from a walled,                               
crater-carved city in Europe - its church
heat flashed diamond -

back to the cold accumulation of Oort
itself, the sky is always falling.  Somewhere.  Great,
black, gap-toothed chunks of celestial snow, doom's
detritus cast down like Thrones from the walls
of heaven, or...  No.

The heart aches for so much more than just some rock,
haphazard, rent from the unremarkable
orbit it has always known.  But stones, simple
stones are inevitable.  Collision.  Oblivion.
The heart's conceit.