Denuded by sandblasts and sun, pockmarked ancient reef with gull-caw memory, sluiced from pre-historic sea. Elkhorn limestone sculpted by undercurrents’ flow—pitched high and dry—you testify life hides and thrives in ink-black hollows from which we arose eons ago.

Ancestral migrations, 

divisions, decisions,
revisions—from potato
fields in Ireland, berths
on the Mayflower, jail
cell wall scratchings,
Quaker meeting silences,
yells and whispers by kin
of slave revolts and Hessian
deserter progeny, gray coat
calvary skirmishes, GoodNews
for Apaches from a Bible
thumping missionary—all aboil,
aflutter, headstoned along
this moment’s epigenetic
backbone.