Overlooking the Nottawasaga

On the cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment
overlooking the patchwork of fields and
woodlots, river valleys and floodplains,
the Algonquin Sea that once beached these heights,
thrived with lifeforms now gone to ground
long before the ancient tundra shore
vanished into the mists that now rise
to fill the primordial basin
with wisps of sea and echoes of
millennium past.

And yet, in the tiniest fossil found
in the minutiae of dolomite
the limestone scarp reveals itself
as the coral reef of a still more
distant time when sea was all there
was in this remaindered sea-bottomed landscape.

Stories so old they can only be told
in the voices of rock and the cadences
of stone can be glimpsed in visions
in the mid-air above the mists
of the long lost younger sea.

And below the patchwork fields and woods,
the aquifer pools and streams in the
underground world beneath the ululating
wind hills that lead down to the connected puddles
that are Georgian Bay and the Great Lakes,
the living waters are being consumed by
the towns and villages of the Nottawasaga valley
like some vast mammalian horde oblivious to
the consequences of depleting the water supply.

In the ages of extinctions life goes from wonder
to wonder like glimpses of far off reflections.