Who was there when Pangaea split
Who saw borders break and continents drift
When shifting rock and heat of time,
Cleft plates apart, pushed ice to brine
The trade winds and the westerlies
The push and pull of the gyre
The glass eel chasing estuaries
To ford and fen to mud and mire
As the leaves are doomed to bruise
And the fruit is bound for falling
We are all compelled to move
Our busy skies and racing ocean
Our strange and heady motion
Who saw the muddy eddies and the sediment
And the weathered cliffs forging monuments
To the labyrinths that the rivers fill
That days disrupt and the nights distill
We are all compelled to move side by side
While roaming cliff and waning moon keep time
For the tiny travellers on ocean currents
Or a desperate flight from the east
The steady shifting of populations
The yearly forfeit of the trees
We are all compelled to move side by side
While roaming cliff and waning moon keep time
Yet here we are in our vice and our vanity
Mindless of the irony
That while patient science adds fact to fact
Hasty man draws lines on maps