Welcome to Flow Friday! Poetry lovers, kick back and enjoy the read!
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“Excavations” by Michael D. Jones i.m. Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
Typically it is infrastructure
Being built
New foundations being dug
Trenching to lay pipe or cable
Or piers and footings for skyscrapers
The Shard, Khalifa, One World Trade
Some massive undertaking
Where entire cities are re-engineered
And disrupted
By unearthed discoveries
Ruins, time capsules, bones
And we reflect as time wavers
In layers of sediment
Our lives spent, our sentiment
And history revisions us.
Then again occasionally
In remote desert areas
A hidden chamber is revealed
By archeologists dressed in linen
Beneath a temple or tomb
Fragments with chiseled figures emerge
Under the oppressive
Heat and ancient sands are brushed aside
From mysterious granite slabs
By clean fingers
Delighted and awed, and self-effacing
At their newfound smallness.
Or more recently, local seekers
In the Channel Islands
Following lore sung in public houses
Or rhymes taught in schools
And using detectors
Exposed a long lost trove
Of Roman or Celtic coins
Obscured by hedge rows
Their silver glint diminished
By the darkness
Sealed inside of earthen jars.
In any case, I am reminded that
Even if largely buried
Or reclaimed by the elements
Our history is a history
Of cuneiforms and hieroglyphs
Animal heads on human bodies
Or rough hewn animal bodies
Silently standing sentinel
And crudely stamped human heads
Issued by governments on silver
Another reminder
Like hedge rows on trenches
Of men that claimed supremacy
In the name of civilization
Over other men
Whose names are reduced by the sands
Or worn away by rain and wind
And forgotten
Or erased from ledgers, or changed
Like so many rebel patriots, emigrants
Into a new world of strange landscapes
That were and now are
Gone astray-
Their names no longer referenced
Their sound lost in our lost sound
And it becomes personal, here
The tongue has been granted the right
To reclaim the past unspoken
Our long silence broken
Around the dinner table at holiday
Between family-
Who we are no longer
Where we came from no more
Any last treasures worth exposing
Monuments to the present sharing
Lines cut in granite. So
Walk on air… it is
Against your better judgement- Spirited.
Under the Christmas lights- with Larkin
Unfazed- in Tollund
Animated- your stick in the air.
Like… Moths then on evening water
Incorruptible by darkness
It would have to be, not butterflies in sunlight-
Against the rain and whispering sands
Expressing all
We lived and loved, our lost and found.
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poet's work. If this is something that you are interested in
participating in, please click on this link and fill out the form. Poems will be posted in no particular order so be sure to keep an eye out for yours!😉
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