Oh dinosaurs, where are they now the days
When we lingered together on the terrace of the morning?
I was too young then, alas, to hear your warning
That all that on this Earth draws breath is lost in the past’s haze.

As little real to me as gnomes or faeries,
You stared out, beady-eyed, from the pages of child’s books;
Yet consciousness, however dim, was in those looks
You turned at moonlights, and the long clouds evening carries.

Amidst a world indifferent and rapacious,
You countless hatched, and fought, and suffered all those ages,
So that a child, one day, could flip, in a few pages,
Through your Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.

But yet, even the simplest of children’s books contains
Such truth about you you could never understand;
In sixty million years, perhaps, some other creature’s hand
Will thumb the primer that our own strange lives explains.