TV shows them almost every week
Bearded uglies and naked women
Some millions of years ago
Tyrannosaurs, dactyls, flying or not
Africanus, habilis , erectus
Lucy and the footprints
Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals
and finally comes the sapiens
But it is the monkeys and the chimpanzees
that they show us time again
eating, fighting, sexing and surviving
The voice-overs always pointing out
how their world ended up our way.
They show us how we learned to walk
With originals wading through a swamp
and because two legs were all now needed
we were free to carry more.
And as we stood much taller now
and could see above long grass
and extra arms now free to kill,
we survived far longer than those before
Again and again I watch that chimp
Peeling sticks and poking grubs
The voice telling me that is how
tools became another step
in the long leap up for us,
Little trouble all this has for me,
for the line we draw from them to us,
seems readily to explain
the mixed-up mess that now we are.
Even before we reached the trees, it is easy to understand
for one night the TV showed
a flippered slug crawling from out the mud, while announcing with great pleasure
that this was early me.
And as I watch my dog and cat
and other animals around
I realize with four, two, and one
of legs, eyes, ears and nose
and with insides equally common,
that somewhere along this line
was something like this flippered thing.
Where I have the greatest trouble,
is knowing whether we learned to think,
for I believe sometimes as I watch the chimps,
fighting among themselves,
we have yet to reach
a thinking stage
They fight for many reasons
so similar to our evils of today,
That I have come to believe
that the biggest question is where to go?
All that TV misses out
will only be completed
in an episode,
still a thousand years away.
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