JOHNMICHAEL SIMON POETRY

Our ancestors did not commence their ancesting with Adam

we hear they’re saying people started even farther back

Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon and other apelike forebears

waders, swimmers, reptiles creepy crawling out of brine,

carbon dated double helix twists of sandy history

their snail and fossil features petrified in rock and ice

 

So say the scientists and who are you and I to doubt them

yet yesterday I met a man who’d taken on the vows

he told me very earnestly that I had things mistaken

that world and all that’s in it was just six millenniums young

and quoted learned sources to assure me that the truth is

everything that creeps and crawls was fashioned in a week

 

And sometimes when I look up at the dark and dust-lit bowl

and wonder if there’s life on planets centuries away

and think how from our loved ones lost we haven’t heard a word

and how to pray for rain and peace and isn’t it absurd

we can’t agree if Eden was another Aesop fable

or whether Adam’s apple dropped a billion years before

 

Perhaps the scientists, you and I and that sincere young cleric

should go together to the garden, munch something psychedelic