The gray slow lizards of my childhood are finished It seems they were only an artifact Of the limitations of our seeing them And now we can see the beautiful dinosaurs All around us, singing They were brightly feathered and not morose With the futility of running only 100 million years and then dying out They were like the birds we know and they probably sang And had complicated mating dances like the birds we know But when they danced the earth trembled As far as any of them could tell they would go on forever And they were happy and they sang Like the birds we know only a hundred times louder Think of it a hundred times louder The earth rang with their glad song And the noise we make is our glad song We are singing our cars and planes and wars and rockets And when we dance the earth shakes too Like it did for the goddamn beautiful dinosaurs And like them too one day our song will finish And what we’ll have become Will be to us as the birds are to the dinosaurs They’ll glancingly hop on an earth that can hold them all Their song will be scaled to the sounds of the wind and the rain And when they dance the ground will not be shaken