underheard
Inert, you said, in our direction.
Unfeeling, without a brain.
We were eating light, making green.
Involved as this was, we still made efforts to translate for you.
You plugged your ears, turned eyes to the cutting glow in your hands.
Working, you said, of what you were doing. We wondered, at what?
You did not seem to have a taste for light and the dark frightened you.
Here, we offered, waving. You turned away.
Innovating breath
Although they, too, would later be lumped––by clumsy taxonomies and antimicrobial prejudice––into a category of creature commonly jeered as pestilence, these tiny pioneers had the chutzpah to dare to take into themselves what all others knew as poison and we now call breath, and life, and living. At the arrival of the great oxidation event, one might imagine the others on the planet lamenting the end. Meanwhile, these guys were like, and now. . . here’s green!
