Maybe You’ve Noticed

Zan Green

May 13, 2022

Maybe You’ve Noticed, there’s a quiet that you’ve felt or less 

missiles in the hedgerows or in the high blueness—circles above you

Losses are now proven—including 1/2 of my favorite sparrows

so if you’re thinking—but cycles aren’t new—it’s true—

many species fell during the last serious die-off—including all major

dinosaurs—(except feathers)—yet I’m curious if this time’s different

After all—T-Rex’s dominated for over one hundred & sixty

five million—& that’s a whole lot longer than us humans—

So we asked—& Carbon-14 was able to tell us that the giant 

Chicxulub crater was about the same age—& leading scientists to 

theorize that an asteroid’s big collision caused a series of tidal waves 

which leveled the land like a sweeper & the final topple came

as darkness descended Earth—after the sun was eclipsed by ashes 

Yet Earth’s die-offs always have survivors—since the Cambrian—

horseshoe crabs have been the Earth’s oldest living fossils

& Gingko Biloba—the Earth’s oldest living trees & pre-Gingko—

the planet was mostly oceans—& before all of them—the blue-

green algae brought us life-giving oxygen—which begs a question—

if the dying birds are the dinosaurs’ last-living relatives 

& horseshoe crabs survived all five major die-offs (until now)

Question’s not—what’s behind the headline—but who

Either way—bird losses don’t just happen & neither does the work

yet a first step towards feathers even recovering is seeing them

as family—with empathy for their struggles—learning what ails them

& the rest is common sense—because that’s what family does

Zan Green grew up in the South of England and moved to Texas in 1992. On the outside, Zan is a mother, and a geoscientist—on the inside, a dreamer for the Earth. Their poems are the tender work of healing. Zan has self-published a trilogy titled All Things Holy, and recently, a tribute to their sister Jay, called Wonderings.