Four billion years, and the line ends its dawn here, in a chair bolted to seventeen other chairs, holding a paper cup of hot brown water that cost as much as the shrew ate in a season. We watched you set the little bell to scream in the dark. We watched you rise anyway.
Do you know what we lost, teaching the body to wake before light? The ones who slept in were eaten. And here you are, upright at an hour that killed thousands of us, choosing it, for a metal bird.
The fire-keeper is beside herself. She spent her whole life feeding one flame, guarding coals in a horn against the wet, and now you drag your thumb across a glowing pane to summon fire that is not even warm, only bright, only pictures. Use it, she says. It is yours. We are only staring.
You are going to sit inside the bird and be flung across a distance the woman who crossed the ice gave her feet to for eleven winters. You will do it before your next meal. You will complain about the meal.
Here is what confounds us, gathered in you like water in a jar: no one is chasing you. There is no season closing, no herd moving on without you, no reason at all except that you want to be somewhere by afternoon. We do not have a word for that. We only ever ran toward staying alive.
Now the great board flickers and you look up, and the lungfish in you, who first dared the terrible dry air, leans close through all of us to see.
Go, we say. Board. The baton was only ever ours to hand you.
Watch. Watch.
Our whole heir, yawning, picking up a bag.