I Wear A Vertebrae On A String Around My Neck - David Hightower - Poem

I Wear A Vertebrae On A String Around My Neck

I wear a vertebrae on a string around my neck.
Don’t shiver when I say this.
I am no killer, no hunter
sporting a gory, glory trophy.
While walking the floor of a ghost ocean
that haunts the frozen tsunami of the Appalachians,
I pocketed for its whiteness
a limestone pebble.
Nestled within I discovered the fossil,
a stone seed within a stone flower.
Once upon a time eons ago,
the sun and moon threaded
the nerves of a breath through beads of bone,
pulled forth an elastic form into an electric life
that surged into the grooves of day and night,
that opened its senses to absorb a world;
saw, heard, felt, smelled, tasted being
until the thread was broken.
This bead remains,
once submerged in fathoms of water,
coated by a blizzard of microscopic shells.
When the ocean receded
it left this circle of bone condensed to stone.
I wear it to honor a being
that for a flicker of time
wandered this earth
before men walked.