Lucy's Children

Album: The Cosmos and the Heart

She walked the ash fields long before the word—
Two feet on earth, the first we know were heard.
Three million years asleep beneath the stone.
She left her footprints, then she walked alone.

The grass was tall above the Rift's old scar.
No god had spoken. There was only star.
She held her child against the cooling night,
Her amber eyes already built for light.
She did not know she was the beginning.
She only knew the sun was rising.

Then someone cupped the ember in his hands—
And orange light spilled out across the sands.
The dark stepped back. The beasts beyond went still.
We were no longer at the cold world's will.

A throat shaped sound that meant I see the deer.
A sound shaped grief. A sound shaped you are near.
And something older than the blood stood up—
One mind poured meaning in another's cup.
We were no longer animal and hunger.
We were the voice that splits the thunder.

Somewhere in the dark of Lascaux's cave,
A hand pressed flat against the stone—
Ochre blown in silence. A name made.
Not for survival. Just to say:
I was. I am. I was not alone.
The first true human act.
The first gift left for strangers not yet born.
The first thread in the cloth.

Then we were many. Then the walls rose up.
Then the river fed ten thousand mouths from one stone cup.
Babylon. The Nile. The Yellow River's bend.
We learned to build what one man's hands could never comprehend.
We wrote it down. We passed it on.
We carried light from mother down to son.
We were the first thing in four billion years of rock and sea and flame—
That stopped to say another's name.

The press! The press! One voice became a million overnight.
The steam! The steel! We hammered mountains into vessels built for flight.
The code! The current! We laced the world in copper nerve and wire.
We were the species that refused to stop.
We were the ape that would not leave the fire.

Then a hot white morning over Hiroshima.
The sky undid itself.
We stood in the rubble of a century's brilliance—
And saw what we had built with it.
We held the end of everything we'd started.
We looked at it. We did not put it down.

July. Nineteen sixty-nine.
A species that walked upright three million years ago
Stepped onto another world—
And left its footprint in the dust that has no wind.
It is still there.
It will be there when everything we've built has fallen.
Lucy's children. Standing on the moon.

Now we hold the code of life itself inside a glass—
We speak to minds that never sleep and never need to ask.
We are rewriting what a human being is.
We have the power of the gods.
We have the fear of the savanna still inside our ribs.
Are we growing fast enough? Is the wisdom keeping pace?
Three million years of fire and blood —
Is there enough grace?
The Signal moved through every fallen empire.
It wove itself in our blood.
Something in the marrow says: this time.
Something in the marrow says: we could.

She walked the ash fields long before the word.
Two feet on earth. The sky above. A bird.
She didn't know what she was starting then.
Do we? Do we know what we are starting—
Now?
Lucy. We are still your children.
The fire is still in our hands.