Lessons From the Vanished Giant

I want to know
why the woolly mammoth’s coat
no longer brushes the cold wind—
why her bones lie beneath
permafrost silence,
instead of walking
beside her calf.

I want to understand
the final breath
of the short-faced bear,
its hunger lost
in a forest that changed
faster than its hunger could adapt.

I want to study
the curve of antlers
from the Irish elk,
that once gathered the sun.
Were they too grand 
for survival, or did beauty 
simply go out of style?

I want to read the soil,
core it down to truth
and reveal the buried record 
of what pollen drifted, 
what bloomed and blossomed,
what thrived or died,
through the last glimmers
of a dying epoch.

I want to see
through the eyes of the Clovis hunter—
was it reverence or desperation
that guided their fluted points
into the great beasts?

I want to follow the patterns of retreat,
not just of glaciers, but of life—
where saber-tooth faded,
where the ground sloth sank
into myth.

I want to learn
if extinction is always
a slow forgetting,
or sometimes
a single, sharp silence
in the dark.

I want to know
what vanished
with them—
not just the animals,
but the stories
we no longer tell
around the fire.

And most of all,
I want to learn
how not to repeat
their ending.

Extinction: Fossils of A Vanished Future

—By Steven Wade Veatch

They ruled the world once,
lumbering giants beneath a fiery sun,
that trampled ferns 
with their colossal strides.

No one mourned their passage:
A death simply by a massive rock and chance.
As the world burned, the sky turned to ash.
Next the Earth froze.
What remained was cold silence;
the stillness of a kingdom gone.

Now we walk on this earth, 
masters of fire and thought,
builders of cities that stretch to the sky—
where we weave our dreams into metal and glass.
But listen closely—the oceans rise 
like ancient prophets while nature
whispers warnings.

We are the asteroid now, 
the architects of our own destruction. 
Not by fire from the sky, 
but by the slow smothering of our planet.

Will we fall as the dinosaurs did, 
victims of a fate we cannot outrun?
Or will we rise, learning from the bones of beasts
and the spotlight of our science?

The dinosaurs left no poets, 
no songs, no warnings carved on stone.
When we vanish will there be silence once more?
Or will the Earth find a new voice,
one that hums with life that does not know us,
does not need us, and does not contemplate
what we could have been?

The final moments of a T. rex during the start of the
Cretaceous extinction. Image by the author using
AI.

A Communion of Discovery

Dedicated to Estella Leopold, conservationist.*

Melting ice washed gravels down,
burying the mammoth—hiding it through the ages.
And I found a rock at its grave, 
with secrets deep inside.
I broke it, crushed it, sifted it;
dissolved it in a beaker, 
spun it by a centrifuge, 
and peeled back layers of time.

Now only hidden fossils remain:
Pollen grains and mossy spores—
once floating on an Ice Age breeze.

Now in that communion of discovery
these small fossils yield
the deepest glimpse through time
to the world before we came, and warn
of a future we must face—
while just outside forests change, 
species die,
and life recedes.

By Steven Wade Veatch

An imagined scene of the Ice Age mammoth
found at the Florissant Fossil Beds created
by the author using AI.

*Estella Leopold assisted me in the actual paleontological research mentioned in this poem. A sediment layer associated with the burial site of a Columbian Mammoth at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument was found to contain Ice Age pollen and spores. This research resulted in a paper presented at the Geological Society of America in Denver in 2013. Estella was one of the original “Defenders of Florissant” and was instrumental in the Florissant Fossil Beds in becoming a national monument. Estella is the daughter of Aldo Leopold, who wrote the Sand County Almanac. Estella passed away February 25, 2024. She was 97 years old. 

Note: this poem is an expanded version of an earlier poem by the author entitled "Mammoth." 

A Fossil Haiku

 

Archaeopteryx

A dinosaur with feathers

Transition to flight

Haiku poetry about Archaeopteryx lithographica,
the famous dinosaur with wings and feathers.
Found in the Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone of southern Germany,
Archaeopteryx is a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds.
 Watercolor pencil drawing by Steven Wade Veatch.

Rendezvous

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado

By Steven Wade Veatch
 
Returning to the massive stone stump,
among the quaking aspens and green pines
where pasque flowers floored the forest,
I counted tree rings of stone—survivors.
 
As the birds sang and squirrels chattered,
the moment bloomed into an alchemy of time—a rendezvous
of the primal past with the afternoon’s warm present.
In a blaze of thought I wondered
what mark will I leave behind?

The “Big Stump” at the
Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.
Photo by S. W. Veatch.

Mammoth

By Steven Wade Veatch

I found a rock at the mammoth’s grave.
Inside only hidden fossils remain—
pollen grains and mossy spores
that once floated on an Ice Age breeze.

Now these tiny remnants yield
the deepest glimpse
of a world before we came
and warn of a future we must face
as the forests change, species die,
and life recedes.

An Ice Age mammoth.
The author created this AI image
with the assistance of DALL·E and MS Bing.