Sauna Thoughts Poem by Roy Ballard

Grown smooth, significant of shape and old
wind-blasted granite slowly turns to sand
in polar valleys where the air, so cold
that even glaciers cannot lay a hand,
preserves the ancient corpses lying there;
ten thousand years in every frozen stare.
Here, hot enough to broil an egg for tea,
the sauna timer drops a slow, thin stream
of silver sand from some long-vanished beach
where silent swimmers, diving from the gleam
of razor teeth and from the horny reach
of tyrant lizards fled and fled again,
surviving all; shape-shifting into men.
Time and again extinction passed them by
and now there's us. I sweat and wonder why.