Spear Horizon

It all seems very, very close, in a way, even though it was such a long, long time ago

Not the jump back from now

To then, long ago,

Humans around a hearth

Working on hunting tools,

Coordinated groups,

Humans being humans,

But the number of lives

It has taken to fill

The interval since then,

Almost all of them lived,

End to end, and then sunk

In the past of each next—

Time’s linear neighborhood,

A city’s worth of lives,

Strung out one at a time.