Other Branch: A Poetry

Before the ice had named us,

before fire learned our hands,

another thinking pressed its brow

against the dark and planned.

They walked a different angle

through the grasses, through the rain,

solved the stone with fingers

we have yet to train.

Perhaps they dreamed in colors

our sleeping minds can't hold,

spoke in frequencies of longing

too deep for us to fold

into language, into symbol,

into anything we'd name —

and so we passed each other

and mistook ourselves for same.

Millennia of divergence,

a quiet, branching art —

they grew into a grammar

we have lost the ears to parse.

No cave holds their image.

No bone betrays the clue.

They became so thoroughly other

that strange no longer grew

large enough to name them.

We search the sky for signs

of alien intelligence

and miss the older lines

pressed into the dark below us,

the path that split in two —

one becoming us, the question,

one becoming something true.

Subject: This poetry deals with the possibility of a parallel evolution of life a split in our own lineage occured perhaps deep in the past.

Note: Images have been generated by A.I and text has been augmented.

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