Griffin Hansbury

A Love Poem

When we were born, the seas were boiling.
We were infinitesimal blooms, tiny
pyrotechnics of protoplasm. I waved
my fringe of cilia as a daisy does its petals

(this was long before daisies, before
the world even dreamed of daisies
and their fickle games of loves-me/
loves-me-not), while you blossomed

and unblossomed, a glittering thing
you were, a constellation to yourself.
Had love been invented then,
I would’ve loved you.

We had to wait--a few billion years,
millions of bodies. When I was a fish, you were a fern.
When I was a green sheet of moss, you
were a white beluga, cruising the pole.

We have known every inch of this earth,
every dark aquifer, every sweating forest;
but it’s those long microbial days
I remember best, our eons in the soup.

The mud was lovely, wasn’t it? O, to be
invisible again, to be Thermotoga maritima
soaking in hot Italian sediment, with nothing to do
but metabolize, multiply, and evolve.

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