A House Burned Down

Cripple Creek, Colorado

No one lives there. The house is a tomb 
with boarded up windows.
Its tar-paper skin tattered, its shingled roof—
tough as a donkey’s hoof—
has lasted through a tired century.
Inside is the scent of decay and abandonment.

It grew on a hilltop: A new square added, 
with each child born—placed 
like boxes, end-to-end—
in the gold mining camp.

One dry and breezy day a fire started. 
The sharp smell of smoke spread. 
The crackling sound of burning wood 
filled the air as raging orange flames
devoured the house.

Under a burned-black skeleton, 
a claw-foot bathtub sits in ash 
Springs of the davenport twist 
like a frozen tornado. An ornate headboard 
is on the ground, used in one era, 
destroyed in the next.

I stop to think, will my life end 
like this place? Just bits and pieces
in a pile of smoldering cinders?

By Steven Wade Veatch

Garden Park Bone Beds

Near Cañon City, Colorado

Art by AI.

The sun burns in a blue, cloudless sky over bone beds.

Everything is quiet in the heat of Garden Park. A coyote darts by,
following a scent like a moth to light.

Dinosaurs once roamed here in ancient marshlands. 
In Late Jurassic times, a long-necked Camarasaurus and Diplodocus
reached up high in trees for sweet Mesozoic greenery to eat.
A Stegosaurus tried to move, mired in mud; 
a Ceratosaurus looked at her nested eggs and sniffed the humid air.

Fossil hunters and scientists have dug here since 1877, 
among the hills and cliffs along the Fourmile Creek Canyon.
Cope and Marsh1 staged part of their Bone Wars here, 
where their rivalry played out at a heated pace. 

Today, picks strike rock layers and shovels dig down through deep time
into thick Morrison mudstone to where buried bones of dinosaurs rested for millions of years.
Brushes clean, sifters shake, measurements and photos taken, and flies swatted—
a tooth of the ferocious Allosaurus pops up, then fossils of turtles and crocodiles. 
More bones, and then a flurry of discovery, wonder, and excitement. 

While standing on the brink of time, I peer into the past and learn
some secrets of Earth’s ancient times.
As the sun dips down, the day’s digging ends. 
While listening to the twilight, I let the milkweed fall 
from my hand to follow the breeze. 

Watching the evening end and the wind tease the tips of grass,
I think about these fossils and wonder what creatures, 
in a distant future, will look at our fossil remains. 
What will they make of us?

By Steven Wade Veatch
__________________________________________

1 Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, were preeminent paleontologists who battled each other for dominance in the world of 19th century paleontology.