Being intelligent inside an ape is like being human inside a car. You’re saddled with a prognathous mask for a face. You’re incapable of words and must resort to loud, alarming noises. Your every motion is absurdly powerful—a dangerous state of affairs because you’re subject to sudden accesses of rage.
Category: evolution
The Last Neanderthal’s Love Song
Fourth installment of a set of children’s poems I wrote a dozen years ago.
The Last Neanderthal’s Love Song
O ancestors! Please hear my cry.
I’m eighteen summers old.
I need a wife, but evolution’s
Left me in the cold.I’m the last Neanderthal.
I have some woman friends—
Nice-looking, others tell me—but
They’re Homo sapiens.I’d like to meet a girl like Mom
With a rich potato form.
These sapiens are willowy;
They don’t look very warm.A woman looks her best, I think,
With low, protruding brow,
But the female forehead fashion
Is high and flat right now.A lady’s lower jaw should sink
Delicately in.
Beneath their lips, these girls have got
A pointy, prickly “chin.”A sideways egg’s the pretty shape
That suits a female skull.
But modern girls have heads as round
As the moon does when it’s full.Alas, O ancestors! Alas,
Our race will not survive.
I’ll never wed, and I’m the last
Neanderthal alive.