To the Survivors

Peter Manos

You survived a time when the earth
was much hotter than it is today.

I stand in front of the museum’s diorama
looking at the exact replica of footprints

the two of you made in the mud
while walking away from a volcano.

Fossilized in the eruptions’ ashes, they
show the path you took in Tanzania

thirty-five thousand centuries ago
and your footprints let us know

that the two of you walked side by side,
away from the volcano, standing upright.

We have no idea, as factual matter
how accurately the scientists’ statues

represent what you looked like,
and your hairy ape-like nakedness

makes group after group of kids giggle
as they pass by on their class trips

but in the silences between their passages
I imagine we inhabit a sacred sanctuary

where I’m praying thankfully through
your statues, seeing past abstractions

and past scientific whys or wherefores
and past the volcanic calamity

to find something iconic in your diorama—
a sublime limitlessness past our climate crisis.

I want to ask you unanswerable questions
past all the praises and gratefulness

after thanking you for standing upright
in the face of that vast calamity—

thank you for your having passed!
Did doubts surround you, or reassurance

from feeling something resembling hope?
Whether it was hope or fear, what you had spans

vast expanses after you, past eons
interlaced with successions of successes—

past millions of years of other unimaginable
calamities, and past stone-on-stone banging

and impossible accomplishments
like inventing the wheel or discovering fire—

past humanity backfilling a narrative for such acts
as a matter of benevolence, or a logical progression,

as if long trains of painful failures weren’t in play—
as if successes and benevolence were intentional

or went with ongoing over-the-shoulder- goading
from some neolithic Jiminy Cricket-ish conscience.

Rather than randomness or passion or irrationality
as a key to our species having managed to survive

we opt for optimism versus pessimism instead
or customary dichotomies to wallow in

not knowing what we owe the two of you—
you who found or misplaced hope or fear

and, having never given up on waiting,
passed as we passed, and pass, and will pass.

Author’s note: The diorama at the Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Hall in NYC was built based on 3.5 million year old fossilized footprints, which showed scientists that an Australopithicus Afarensis couple walked away, arm in arm, from a volcanic catastrophe.

The faces of the early human couple in the diorama reminded me of part of T. S. Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets,” where he tells his soul to “wait without hope,” and says that “the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”

To solve seemingly impossible problems, we need to connect with a deeply patient sense of hope. We also need to connect with each other, and with the strength our ancestors had when they faced challenges as great, or greater, than the climate challenges we must now address.