Holocene Poem by gershon hepner

Living in the Holocene
period, Adam spoke to Eve,
pointing to where ice had been,
and declared: 'I don’t believe
the world could really be as old
as we are told by that tall snake
who claims it used to be most cold
until hot fire made it quake.
This must be false, for we’re the first
smart creatures on the earth. He knows
the earth is flat, and feels most cursed
because he cannot touch his toes,
since they are very far away
from his short arms. The night is young.
Come let us in the garden play,
And I will lick you with my tongue.”
He did not know then how to frolic,
living in the Holocene,
with her curves that, hyperbolic,
beckoned to her hollow scene.
He didn’t even know that he
could use another organ to
excite his partner, until she
persuaded him that he should do
what from a reptile she had learned.
He listened, and had lots of fun,
but all her other lessons spurned,
including the important one
about the great age of the earth,
and how they both had just descended
from great apes who gave them birth,
for by these tales he was offended,
in his lessons from the snake
being truly most selective,
never willing then to take
a geology elective,
let alone one in biology.
For such courses mankind waited
for millennia, theology
the theme that played when they first dated.

Sandra Blakeslee writes about a huge wave that covered a large area of Madagascar 4,800 years ago, which would have been about a thousand years after God created Adam and Eve according to Genesis 1-3 (“Ancient Crash, Epic Wave, ” NYT, November 14,2006) :
At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high. On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater,18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface. The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land. Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean. Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every few thousand
years


11/14/06