Anthropogenesis

The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
Thomas Hardy - Lines on the loss of the Titanic.

With the first kick of boot onto spade
The worm shrinks back.
Epoch,
Era,
Eon.
Nature counts sedimentary time.
Holocene,
Pleistocene,
Pliocene.
Uranium beats half-life to lead
Ceno,
Meso,
Palaeozoic,
Taking the time it takes
Devonian,
Silurian,
Ordovician.
The pendulum keeps deep time.
Cambrian,
Pre-Cambrian,
Proterozoic.
And the sea-worm crawls
Slimed, dumb, indifferent
Up from the swing of blind inertia.
Archean,
Palaeo,
Mesozoic
Eon, Era, Epoch
Neogene, Holocene, Human
Human Human.
Post-Human.