The Carnian Pluvial Event 234–232 million years ago

Without ceasing. Nothing to ease the water. We lived

and died under dark clouds. Our hearts beat to the downpour. Species

came and went, transformed in and out of being. There was

a lingering of living things. I drowned. The worst happened

and then happened again. We forgot the sun. The strong devoured

the weak, then devoured everything. The water became the air.

We called it an episode, an event—our dying. We called it carnian,

like carnic, meaning, from the flesh. We buried coccoliths, ammonite,

dinoflagellate. We drank ourselves. We sang six hundred names

for vapor, prayed salt, wept acid. We mourned crinoid, ammonoid—

the spineless. We welcomed crocodile and conifer. We forgot what it was

to rain, deprived of the absence of it. After everything saturated, we drifted, 

waterlogged. We learned to love the deluge. So tell me, are there any

words that can describe our devastation when, one day, it stopped?