The Delta Sea

My father told the story; before man roamed the hills edging the Mississippi delta, the land was a dinosaur home. The loam from the forest soil washed into a shallow sea covering cockle and coquina with a fertile layer of earth. The well digger brought up proof, bleached white by millennia, minerals sacrificed for farmland, ancient shells and fossil crabs. My great uncle sat on a vertebra from a mineralized sauropod and later school confirmed, oh yes, there once was a sea. And if I needed further proof, late at night from the ridge road, the stars reflected in dappled light upon the fluid city streets below. Imagining, I could squint my eyes and travel back through time to gaze on a cretaceous swamp where now the man fish sleep.