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Homo Neanderthalensis

Old teeth still talk. Shards of bone and flint
blades found in Spanish caves, scraps
of DNA unravel the edges of a story—
a sentence from which to divine an epic.

What tales did these other humans tell
when their cousins came north, surrounded
them and built a new world full of strangers?

Did they know their time had come? Did they
dance with ghosts and worry about decline?
Did they imagine other isolated outposts of their kind
lonely and encircled also by these wise interlopers?

I would like to have known them, and I wonder
how the world would be if there were still
mirror humans, living in a shadow world,
hunters stalking slopes alongside us,
mysterious as strange footprints in the snow.

The sun must still have risen and set, ice receded
as the world shrank down to just a range,
a hill, a cave. Is this the way of age, this shrinking
of the landscape until we wander no farther
than the yard, puttering around our piece of earth,
no longer wondering (and just a little afraid of)
what lies beyond the blue gray mountains?

Inspired by the National Geographic article “Last of the Neanderthals” (Oct 2008).

Published inPoems

13 Comments

  1. I love the word ‘puttering’ and how you use it here. You ask some good questions, and do so in an engaging fashion.

  2. There are so many things I love about this: the strong nouns; the set up by the first stanza; the line “a sentence from which to divine an epic”; the parallels to us in our time; the idea of being able to shadow these other people in another time; and the last stanza…every part of it.

    • Thank you, Margo. Those epics have long fascinated me. My favorite parts of National G are often the guesswork about what life was like for long-extinct people and animals, early humans, dinosaurs and the like.

  3. I’ve picked up sherds of pottery where the ancients of this country left their cities and ceremonial plazas full of questions. I’ve walked where the old stone walls crumble along lost ridges of mountain fores and sometimes I feel the shadows cast from my form belong to something unseen beside me. Your mythopoetic voice in this piece summons them for me.

    • Thank you, Wendy. Those southwestern places you mention have long captured my imagination too, though I see them far less often than I’d like…

  4. Ooh, splendid connection with the past… Wendy’s right, “mythopoetic” is a good word to use here. The lines “Old teeth still talk” and “mirror humans” are both killer.

  5. deb deb

    Here randomly via Beth Westmark , and in that blog connection way, I just wrote about ancestors, and teeth.

    I’ve bookmarked your blog and look forward to reading more.

    • Thanks for visiting, deb, and for your comment. I tried to go to your site, but the URL must contain a typo because Blogger says it doesn’t exist. I hope you’ll come back and tell me where to look as I’d love to read what you wrote.

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