With Buttercups Between Its Teeth

With Buttercups Between Its Teeth

With buttercups between its teeth

They found a wooly mastodon

That had been buried underneath

The ice of ages long since gone.

This animal whose frozen flesh

The huskies able were to eat,

Had to have been so very fresh

As any butcher’s frozen meat.

It couldn’t have thawed out before,

But had to be left underground,

Maybe three thousand years or four 

Until its carcass could be found. 

Its body must have frozen through

By such a drop in temperature

As sudden climate change could do

So as its tissues would endure.

A buttercup could not’ve grown

Within a frigid, barren clime,

Which looks like our arctic zone

Appears to seem in our time.

How should a herd of elephants

Survive the climate, like it is,

Before a glacier should advance

To leave it in its lifelessness?

A change that overcame the face

Of everything around about,        

Which left the mastodon in place

By wiping life completely out, 

Could not have been so long ago

As archaeologists would say,

Under the present ice and snow

We know of, as exists today.