Excerpt from Pole Shift title sequence

Poems for a magnetic pole reversal

—IV—

Forgotten stranger, ground

to sandpaper by time, mere

molecules of memory.

Easy to forget the tornado

of grief that rips through you,

leaving smashed debris, the cant

and tainted colour of poles

tilted dizzy in spilled twilight.

We forget utterly endless lives,

yet forget nothing. A Titanic

of submerged realities—

occasional surfacing

of a chair, a shoe, a just-

remembered face.

—V—

Crags hunker over Tasmania’s

frayed artifact of time.

Buried in Lake Selina’s watery

memory, 40,000 years old,

the thousand scattered fragments

of a compass, still shuddering

the geomagnetic aftermath.

Sifted through the layer cake

of millennia by young,

curious hands. A lake’s clear

lens stares back at us through blue

remembrance, wondering

if we’ll remember each other.

—VI—

Time’s red ochre flashbulb

of handprints on a Lascaux

cave wall—cool refuge

from a drunken planet

staggering to port, cosmic

sailor on a Laschamps excursion.

The answer to “life, the universe

and everything” not just 42,

but 42,000 years ago—

all these numbers so much

spaghetti on a wall thrown

by scientists hoping something sticks.

And did Earth’s tipsy wobble

welcome in lethal radiation

that killed off Diptrodon,

the giant wombat, or Australia’s

giant kangaroo? Did hunters

smear their bodies with red

sunscreen to better endure

the day’s hunt under a sun

grown bitter? True science

opens more questions than answers,

but in this age of reversals,

the urge to question has become

the urge to hammer down

certainty, the spirit’s love

of mystery beclouded.

REFERENCES:

• A “Laschamps excursion” is the term scientists use to describe the flip-flop of Earth’s magnetic poles between 42,000 and 41,000 years ago that briefly but dramatically shrank the magnetic field’s strength, possibly causing mass extinctions and weather anomalies. Carolyn Gramling, “A magnetic field reversal 42,000 years ago may have contributed to mass extinctions,” Science News, February 18, 2021: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/earth-magnetic-field-reversal-mass-extinctionsenvironment-crisis

• Agathe Lise-Pronovost, “We found the first Australian evidence of a major shift in Earth’s magnetic poles. It may help us predict the next,” The Conversation, February 14, 2021: https://theconversation.com/we-found-the-firstaustralian-evidence-of-a-major-shift-in-earths-magnetic-poles-it-may-help-us-predict-the-next-155040