#archaeology
I am ready
to ring your rib
around my wrist
in triumph—
the faintest of relics
enliven me. My lips
still layered
as in the night you lost them.
I hope to hammer
your heart
& stuff its soil
in the sutures
of your skull;
I want to call that
the shadow to
kintsugi;
I want our memories never
to seep; to set
them up for decryption.
Unloving is a study—
consider an archaeologist’s
tentative hands
demystifying an artifact
once treasured for its secret
& leaving no spots
behind.
Apr 25, 2021
Apr 25, 2021 at 11:24 PM UTC
I walk twenty steps, five feet
down into the darkness
of buried secrets
on the outskirts of the oasis
I walk twenty steps, five feet
in the excavation
next to the shallow ditch
which was once a pond
Discovered from the sky
vaguely marked in the sand
by odd gauge values
of the substrate
Back into the light
where a man sits
on the roots of an old tree
looking at me
Compelling, he beckons me
pointing to his water bottle
and I realise
that he knows the answers
to the questions I shall ask
when he is no longer there
Mar 21, 2019
Mar 21, 2019 at 5:45 AM UTC
Flavia swore as the heavy earthenware pitcher slipped from her hands and crashed onto the uneven flagstones. As she knelt in the puddle of tepid water and started gathering in the pieces, she heard the rapidly approaching footfall of an armed legionary.
‘Leave that now, there’s no time. We ride for York immediately.’
‘But mea domina...’
‘The Wall is breached. Hurry, puella, or she'll start without you!’
Flavia picked up her sodden skirts and ran.
§
I held my breath as the last piece of the Corbridge ewer slid smoothly into place and wondered at the exquisitely crafted motif which encircled the body of this ancient vessel. A procession? A cavalcade? Curious, if not for the men-at-arms, I would have thought it a pageant. And there in a covered wagon a noble woman looking back at a young girl standing on the steps of a villa holding her hem in her hands.
Mar 9, 2019
Mar 9, 2019 at 3:41 PM UTC
whispers of architecture
footprints in the dust
I WAS HERE
Mar 3, 2019
Mar 3, 2019 at 2:50 PM UTC
I am here on an archaeological quest,
to satisfy many a curious mind's request
for knowledge on antiques and artifacts
of Egypt's long extinct historical facts,
in treasured sands buried, like gold mines earnestly
sought for in stories shrouded in mythology.
With a large contingent just as curious as I,
hardly daunted by curses, but with shoulders high,
We went to the field, the sun baking us chaps
to a baker's delight. With our rumpled maps,
we searched every clue, and were bitten perhaps
by a million flies. Getting relief from sunless skies
in times of fair weather, whilst hoping something lies
in the depths of the hot sands for our very eyes
to see. With my tools by hard work and search worn out,
I brushed to full view, the tomb, brilliantly carved out
of young blue blooded Tut, regally laid to rest.
To my wearied colleagues I spoke in real earnest:
'To exhume the past, we are here at last.'
May 31, 2018
May 31, 2018 at 7:22 AM UTC
Your broad forehead glistening--
kissed with salt from the sweat
of the sea you've never seen.
The clay is still under your nails
from molding the beaker beside you.
Meadowsweet on your lips
you lay down to die
with the softness illness brings.
Tonderghie copper hair
falls over your knees,
body curled as a new babe's.
Carry with you our songs to the afterlife
from this cold forest
to clearest skies.
Mar 28, 2018
Mar 28, 2018 at 3:00 PM UTC
When archaeologists pull
something out of the dirt,
they call it a discovery.
I imagine them years from
now, "discovering"
skyscrapers and microwaves
and styrofoam cups. I can see
them with my broken body.
*There's something different
about these bones,* they say,
something heavy.
There is a message in here
somewhere. There is a riddle
that still twists my hands up.
They said there was a place
inside me where the music
had gone wrong.
I said, *There is no such thing
as wrong music.*
I've been at myself with a pick
axe for a long time, trying to
discover something new and
groundbreaking underneath.
just sediment
May 10, 2017
May 10, 2017 at 4:43 PM UTC
for RFG
You told me of your love for London
and I, of mine for Jerusalem.
And we speak of our second homes
and our first loves,
and how those memories
should be left for the archaeologists,
and how we must for the time being
carefully avoid the subject
each of the other
like diplomats
in London or Jerusalem
busily seeking
positive signs,
in one and the other
or those things
we love elsewhere
and wish we could have
here at home.
Aug 31, 2016
Aug 31, 2016 at 8:05 PM UTC
Three parts treasure hunter
to two parts scientist,
the archaeologist
with picks and brushes
sifts through shards and ruins,
echoes of ancestral time,
burning for answers:
How on earth did we manage
to carve out shelters from the crust
tilting the scales
of survival in our favor?
A cliff house here, a cathedral there
a village by the river
chronicling our escape from
the shadows of pre-recorded time.
We wonder where they all went
and why they vanished, but the real question
that haunts our paleolithic selves,
is who are we and where are we going?
October 30, 2015
Oct 30, 2015
Oct 30, 2015 at 12:06 PM UTC
Ancient leviathan,
City in sands
Razed in a roar.
Now silence stands
Taller than your
Pillars did before
As the world looks on
It can’t but abhor
Let sleep find your
Great arches now
Though brought down
They did not bow
For their shadows
Outstretch the hand of man
And the rote of
All religion’s plans.
They did not destroy!
They have not won!
And in undoing
Become
undone.
Oct 8, 2015
Oct 8, 2015 at 3:17 PM UTC
In a Green Friar car park
a professor turns the key -
his engine shudders - falls mute.
Leaning classword into the wind,
his footfalls cover the echoes
of the lethal chaos beneath his feet -
masking the curses of proud Richard
struggling to keep his saddle.
Then, in a whirlwind of swords,
the final Rose of Lancaster
falls in slow motion
to the Leichester earth -
merging with the primal dust.
The professor's archaeologists
have arrived for the dig
and Richard's bones begin to stir.
Sep 28, 2015
Sep 28, 2015 at 11:29 AM UTC
Maybe men labored under a yellow sky
bent under barley sheaves they’d cut,
returned behind limestone walls and leaned
to splash water on each other at the well.
You can see its crumbling curve today, in one
city as old when Cheops' pyramid was built
as pyramids are to us right now.
Jericho, not so far away from Egypt and,
our archaeologists tell us, likely really didn’t hear
the blare of Joshua’s trumpets shuddering down
old Canaan-cursed by-Noah, coaxing walls
to shudder, teeter, list from Israelite raids.
You see one barley-bearer shaking dry,
descend stair-tunnels to his flat to kneel
before his hungry daughter, hungry wife,
waiting for evening’s barley bread to cool.
He joins as they resume their business of the day
to gently set the cowrie eyes in Grandma’s face,
two priests removed the rest of her last year,
but left the precious head to decompose at home
scented in the wall with sweet Netufian herbs,
And now the family gathers near small fire,
desert nightbreeze filtering through the cracks
tenderly to soften Mother’s bony head
with daubs of plaster re-create her nose,
and gaping eye sockets, softening too
those black orbits with white plaster.
Slowly her death’s head touched tenderly
by younger finger tips becomes
something like a human head again,
If not quite living, cowrie shells complete
this vision of a vacant queenly stare
befits a family shrine. When things are done,
small granddaughter now squeals with delight
her own dark eyes reflect the fire-light.
May 19, 2015
May 19, 2015 at 6:51 AM UTC
Antiquity was waiting to breathe
And awaiting the moisture of lungs.
A hole, eyeball wide, offered just a peek;
Along with an ancient mote,
Which flew from eternity into sight.
Remarkable things were seen!
In the heat the buzz was slight.
As was the bite. But, ultimately,
The fevers started burning in the night
(For after all, the cobra had eaten the yellow canary).
How your coverings and remains sparkled like the sun!
Thousands of years of hiding suddenly undone.
But, we all rot together, eventually eaten.
May 5, 2015
May 5, 2015 at 6:17 PM UTC
(Inspired by article below)
I.
Continuity
your filibuster egg of sand
dazzled curiosity
with creaky shell of hints
heaped upon the tedium
of knowledge's unfurl undeterred
by encyclopedic impatience
Assurances of rip(Van Winkl)ed
economics shooed paper strings of
revelation like anarchy-powered
taxes summoning a foreword
to anachronistic campaigns
of environmental friendliness
II.
Meanwhile years
have been filed down to flashes of
chronology for continuity's organic rebus
However long it took
the economic karma to fall into the
abodes of hedonistic pharaohs
it was instant
Skin that ruled behind the constitution
of allergic breath
bailed on the bones against their most
sublime intentions
Limbo-treading landlords
huddled in their mummified freeze
after breadline bashers scolded them
with the spoils of a new brand
of pyramid scheming
Robbers of the coffin palaces
stole the intimations of identity
theft from today
Immortality and freedom
were compelled to share a meaning
like estranged siblings
or bound dynasties
I(a).
Abydos
how you coyly toyed with us
with a diversion bordering on monolithic
04 23 14
Apr 23, 2014
Apr 23, 2014 at 12:58 PM UTC