The Day the Earth Still Stood

It happened in accordance with the prophecy.
There was a blast of searing wind, and forests burned;
upright trees were stripped of their branches for miles,
and in London, a quarter of the way around the world,
the explosion expelled so much dust into the atmosphere,
people could read at night due to the refraction of sunlight.

The prophecy stemmed from the scrolls of the Tungusk people,
who inhabit the region of the Tunguska River of central Siberia.
The sacred prophecy declared that one day the sky would burn,
that rivers and lakes and, indeed, whole regions would disappear,
that the ground would open up, that mountains would be leveled,
and that the sun would turn black as sackcloth--all life would perish.

Yet on that gentle June morning long ago, nobody saw it approach.
It remained nothing more than a speck lost in the glare of sunlight.
For eons it had drifted aimlessly in the cold, vast expanse of space,
stolidly static, unperturbed, an ancient conglomerate of water ice
along with methane and ammonia, perhaps, awakened finally from
its billion-year trance as it careened on a collision course with Earth.

The prophecy was sacred to the simple people of Tungusk region,
the fisherman, the hunters, the wizened-faced, learned old elders
who passed down the sacred prophecies in the tradition of fathers,
as much a part of the daily life as their reliance on skins and campfires.
Yet when the sky turned to fire, when the concussion blast flattened
trees like broken matchsticks, survival attained a much higher priority.

Many of the Tungusk people did survive to tell the tale of the event,
when their world shook and destruction accompanied cosmic thunder.
The world continued, and did not end, because it was a comet fragment
that came as a thousand Hiroshima bombs, detonating high in the air,
because it was less dense than an asteroid, being made mostly of ices.
And the prophecy so esteemed, was not such good prophecy after all.

30 Lines

In 1908, the greatest explosion ever recorded on Earth, “The Tunguska Event,”
occurred in the Tunguska region of central Siberia, Russia. The consensus is
that it was a piece of a comet, exploding 5 to 10 kilometers above the ground.
The destruction was great, but at least it was not an extinction level event,
which would have been the case had it been a rocky asteroid, say,
making it all the way to the ground, annihilating all life.