Ode to an Ammonite

March 29, 2026 Poet: Dave Ferguson Artwork: Ammonite by Don Litchfield

Ode to an Ammonite

You lived.

You swam.

You were buoyant.

You were rapacious.

Fern-like suture lines

divide your coiled chambers:

your various snakestone homes.

You and yours withstood eons:

Three hundred and sixty million years.

Witness to the Devonian,

you slipped through the needle-eye of the Permian’s end—

survivor of the Great Dying—

to claim the Triassic and Jurassic seas,

until the Cretaceous fire turned your ink to stone.

You and yours perished, extinct:

your remains interred in limestone.

Your form, curled and helical,

like the ram’s horn of Ammon,

endures, circling

against time.