We pulled you from the ageless dark
and embraced your bones in plaster—
a hasty sacrament to note
your restoration to the world of light.
Now you stand in tribute to your kind:
a breathless monument of when you lived.
I hope you had some peace, a sip of cool,
dark water before your hooves got stuck.
You must have panicked, alerting wolves
to share in your entombment.
Your flesh was lost to them, the rest to time,
and after thirty thousand years
of sleep, I find you here with me.
I’ve cleaned the years off your skull,
absolved the tar from your spine.
Prodigal bones return to order.
I piece them back together,
puzzling you alive again.
Devon Moody’s writing has appeared in Measure, Variations (Switzerland), Writer’s Forum (UK), and The Ohio River Review. Additionally, she has been a finalist for both the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and the New Letters Prize for Poetry. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Evansville and her MLitt from the University of St. Andrews. Devon currently lives near Lexington, Kentucky where she teaches and rides horses. She has never quite grown out of a childhood obsession with dinosaurs.