Flow Friday

Welcome to Flow Friday! Poetry lovers, kick back and enjoy the read!

--------------------------------------------------------- 

“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.

---------------------------------------------------------

Every Friday, I will showcase one or two other 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!😉