In the beginning, I’ve read, there was darkness
and something indefinable hovering on the water,   
after which, on what has been called the “First Day”,
there was light, then life, a cell or two, 
somehow multiplying and changing in the murky water.

In Days Two to Five, land appeared, 
continents shifted and buckled, mountains rose, 
magma flowed and changing creatures 
crawled from the sea and slime. 
On land now parched desert sand, 
thick forests grew, collapsed, and in burial 
were transformed, their hidden energy 
stored for a future polluting time.
Sea, sky and land filled with teeming life 
and ferocious beasts arose, gigantic, 
roaring, snarling, roaming the earth 
or stretching membrane wings to fly 
or raging and plunging in the deep water.  
Huge meteors struck the earth. 
Catastrophes of flood and ice 
buried and marked in stone 
myriads of delicate, beautiful remnants, 
the recorded shapes and patterns 
of the long, complex and changing ages of earth.  

On Day 6 an animal different from other animals 
--gifted, extraordinary, creative, endlessly inventive-- 
stood upright, decorated the walls of caves,
made melody more wonderful than sweetest birdsong, 
built, named and categorized the world, wrote, 
loved, laughed, hated, forgave, desired revenge, 
contemplated the moon and the stars, 
looked backwards and forwards, 
sought to understand mortality, 
grieved for loss, longed for life, grasped at eternity,   
and desiring dominion, picked up and swung a club. 
Machines scurried across earth and sky, 
penetrating the edges of the heavens. 
digging huge holes, and from their waste 
smoke poured into the sky and littered the planet 
until the earth in anguish cried out 
and floods, storms and days of heat and cold came
until it seemed that darkness was descending 
and some, filled with anxiety, cried out in fear  
at what may be coming upon the earth. 

So now, after all this time, 
after all this progress and regress, 
after species have come and gone over millennia 
but now with increasing rapidity, 
it comes down to a man at a computer  
thinking and typing about this blue planet,  
--this green earth, this miracle of teeming abundance 
evolving over vast millennia,  
this rotating revolving sphere of cloud, sea and land 
carving its repetitive path through the darkness of space,  
this planet that grew animals so brilliant 
that their heads were in the stars, 
yet so restricted by their plodding feet of clay--
and as he types, he’s challenging 
the consequences of human dominance 
and taking problematic issues of warming, 
overpopulation and nuclear holocaust  
to their absolute extreme, wondering
if this earth will again return to its ancient origin 
and that the fabled Day 7, the Day of Rest, 
is a day where restless humanity is silenced,
where all is once more quiet and still 
and only darkness covers the face of the mighty deep.