Cave Art Explained Poem by Don McWilliams

Six and one-half billion of us live here
mostly alone and most
will never see you,

thus I render these poems
and for no reason but
to paint you to the wide world
that you might live in their eyes
as you have in mine.

Could they all but pass
before you in a single line,
pausing only to admire
or take a photo, no flash, please,
well then, if it were so
I would break this pen
and burn this book.

In Lascaux, before there were poems
or poets, a solitary man
held his hand against a cave wall
and blew an ochre outline thereof.

He knew time only as an abstract.
Time of snow,
of darkness,
of hunger.
And of the other hunger,
which time could not assuage
or darkness ease.
He took charcoal,
still warm,
and made his world live forever.

He drew the girl.
She, from another cave.
Crudely, his skill limited,
but clearly her, two legs, two arms,
breasts.
His bison, antelope, aurochs
were better, beautiful precisely
because he did not need for me
to understand that they
were beautiful.

Sixteen thousand years later
four boys climbed down into the cave
and in the same faint light,
a single match held high,
beheld the work.
'A girl, ' said one, and the others,
'Yes, a girl.'

Thus she who he had made live
lived on,
the artist's voice and his audience
manifest at last,
his longing clear,
abundant,
unreconciled.