Climatology
By Luke Davies
Published 6 August 2025
“… cell by cell the coral reef
Builds an eternity of grief.”
Alun Lewis, “Song (on seeing dead bodies floating off the Cape)”
Did the fury descend, or burst?
Permian Extinction followed the Permian Eruptions;
thus, precedence. I was pretty worried about dying
during this long phase of my life, even
underwater, greatly upsetting the bioluminescence.
As a shrimp, I felt like a little kid.
There were no libraries in the ocean then.
I had to make do with wild hypothesis,
skittering tra-la through the coral reefs
and somehow knowing one day I’d wear
a t-shirt saying “I Survived the Permian”.
Hundreds of millions of years later, after
all the therapy, after the puddles of dread evaporating
on newformed land, the question remained:
Had the rage descended or burst? I couldn’t
get the measure of a single thing.
Violence set our teeth on edge these million years.
To the extent love felt like flying, or laughter, or stroking
the soft crook of your elbow, for hours,
all degrees of wetness were possible all at once;
we were always inheriting something not our own;
we didn’t need to be here. I didn’t want
to die alone with my blood exploding. But I wasn’t
seeing ways out. Would it be pleasant, thoughts
being shelved in the blood’s final moments,
before each corpuscle, before rain? Over there that dog
is having an uncomplicated experience with the wind.
Wallace Stevens wrote, “Of what disaster is this the imminence?”
And elsewhere: “Of what is this house composed if not of the sun?”
Mix imminent chaos with a shaft of light moment, in a poem of 8-14 lines.
Luke Davies
#30in30 writing prompt
There’s this Richard Powers novel I once read, Plowing the Dark, where this one character says to another, “Do you believe in God?” And the other character thinks for a minute and says, “That’s not the form my astonishment takes.”
And what happened to me was that at thirteen years old, I had that experience of being astonished by poetry. And now fifty years later it still happens, it’s still a place that I go to, it’s still a place where I’m fortunate enough to regularly experience astonishment.
Luke Davies
#PoetryAmbassador #PoetryMonth
