This is where we went wrong:
that first day, eons back, after humans

draped in hair or animal skins
with sharp yellow teeth and

filthy fingernails, at last
found a plant they could eat

and wondered what lay beneath it.
If under the ground, there might be

a whole primordial supermarket
of edible roots and berries

just waiting to be discovered. So
they dug with those same hands

that archeologists now tell us
made tools and swung from branches

turning up inch after inch
of rich black earth, insignificant

insects, the tendrils of the plant’s
roots reaching delicately downward,

always down, towards something else.
Shoulder to shoulder, grunting as

they turned up great earthy fistfuls,
all through the night until day broke

and they beheld the chasm they’d made.
At the bottom of the pit, that place

from which all roots begin, just
a hard plain bed of rock. Not edible,

not watery, not soft like a woman
or gold like the sun, but a plate of stones

ancient as that time before time
when the rigid Precambrian crust

exhaled fumes for an atmosphere,
pushing up nutrients from its

petrified breast. There was a lesson here
but they were hungry. Their hands

were bleeding. Their groins
wanted attention. So they climbed out

to work on spears and temples,
forgetting that pit and how

for one odd moment,
the dark was almost familiar.

§ § §

Michael Meyerhofer is currently earning his MFA at Southern Illinois University. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Chiron Review, Free Lunch, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, Snow Monkey, Modern Haiku, American Tanka, Verse Libre, Diagram, The Circle, Snapshots, Famous Reporter, Frogpond, and others.

Reprinted from Ink Pot #5; available now