On Finding A Stone Age Tool At Hitches Lane Poem by Jean Bernard Parr

On Finding A Stone Age Tool At Hitches Lane



This blade of glassy flint
I un-earth with fingers
the first to touch!
it emerges, a chrysalis,
blinking away six thousand years
since that skilled artisan
knocked flake from parent stone
of him no trace is left,
save this work, not rude
nor rough, but accomplished
in the choosing
of angles, and where to strike,
deft, the blow, I see him
cross-legged, in quiet corner,
basking in evening glow
apart from ravenous children din
turning the stone, with practiced
heft
then,
what thoughts might assail, as all
are nested in nights dark blanket?
or what wondrous shapes
and forms appear, dancing
around bone-blacking firelight?

This shard of flint rasping
the edge of my page cuts
a small victory for a life
long gone,
to dent the present thus!
when my wayward spark
from life's fire detaches
and spirals in upward dash
paper and ideas soon whirled
away as wind banished leaves
no hymn to my fevered vanities
no paeans will ring out
nothing weightier
than the husk of a grassphopper

Thursday, January 21, 2016
Topic(s) of this poem: archaeology
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Jean Bernard Parr

Jean Bernard Parr

Sallanches, France
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