Visiting a Son

Today has been the death of dinosaurs.

No one knows why – with any certainty –

They gave up lumbering their tons,

Nor how quickly turned to being specimens.

Was it centuries, a week, or thirty years perhaps?

The thirty years between me and my son

As students in this town returned to now –

Streets, pubs, memories.

  Maybe a meteorite

Sixty-five million years ago

Jacuzzied itself where Iceland is

And spread iridium paste, a dead thin layer

Still traceable across Cretaceous clays.

And the change that brought to plant uptake

Produced the flowering species perhaps –

Numerously blooming. Meteor Chairman Mao

Achieved all that and the ferny logs

These huge things lived on were replaced

With daintier fare by far, except it had

Alkaloid poisons which laid them out.

In my day, too, here giants stalked the land,

I’d tell my son if he’d listen to such stuff.

C.S.Lewis he’s heard of, even David Frost.

So unlikely that they lived, the dinosaurs;

Unknown why they died. ‘If we knew that…’,

I say…if we knew that, what then?

Be thus enabled to relate the way we were

With what we are more closely than we can?

Sort out our epochs and draw lines

To map our vital forces taking different forms?

My father visiting me here could never see

The differences – all he saw was Youth,

A common factor blurring all

My serious young ex-soldier saw.

But today with emphases at other angles

I find no precipitate cutting-off

Between the present and the Jurassic Fifties.

Brightly as ever

Above the Old Cavendish labs

I’m toured around, Orion bulls his belt.