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Lullabye for the Second Millennium

By J. Allyn Rosser b. 1957

From the point of view of all time,

these recent changes signal

more a return to nature

than a departure, than degradation.

In the beginning, after all,

there was boiling rock.

Then waters arranging their bodies

around an era of softer forms:

lichen, grassland, swaying treetops.

Then creatures, movingly fleshed,

treading pathways that hardened.

Then pavement hardening

and cities, monumental.

Soon mostly rock again,

and radiant. More and more like moon.

Soon, sooner than is being thought,

there will be even more light.

The creatures will have stopped

being able to move

or be moved.

And the rock will boil.

Source: Poetry (December 2000).

Biography

J. Allyn Rosser was born in Pennsylvania and attended Middlebury College in Vermont as well as the University of Pennsylvania where she earned a doctorate. Her works include Bright Moves (1990), which won the Morse Poetry Prize, and Misery Prefigured (2001), winner of the Crab Orchard Award. In 2007 she was awarded The New Criterion Poetry Prize for a new book of poems entitled Foiled Again, published in the Fall of 2007. . . .

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