by Paul Hostovsky
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Yes, let’s all go back to where we all came from— all of us—a few hundred thousand years ago, back to the Great Rift Valley in Africa where Mitochondrial Eve first opened her skirts and had enough daughters in a continuous chain for her mitochondrial DNA to survive. Let’s all go back, every last one of us, by foot or by boat–whichever way we came—no cars, trains, airplanes— those of us who left reuniting with those who never left. Plenty of room now for all of us in the vast network of valleys that stretches between the Red Sea and Mozambique where the giant rift is slowly tearing apart– the Nubian tectonic plate and the Somalian tectonic plate ever so slowly pulling apart, and at the same time separating from the Arabian plate in the north. Let’s meet in Ethiopia where the three plates meet. And though it will take us all a long time to get there—8 billion of us and counting— that’s okay because it will take a long time for the fractures in the earth’s crust to open up completely and form a new ocean. But when they do we will all be there. And then let's all line up and hold hands and go jump in a lake together.
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Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.
So much truth!!!