Horizon

            Looking Back Beyond Our Own Horizon.

Archaeology appears a never-ending 

Expanding occupation as we explore

Our earth and find more lost lines of

People from the past. Why were they

And their way of life so often severed 

Thus that these must dig for hints of 

Their hopes and aspirations, methods

Of machinery, imaginations, machinations,

Left shadowed in splinters and shards,

In discarded tools and dwellings abandoned?

.

Is it so easy to snap these threads?

Or is it the exact opposite: only 

Possible if families never leave, and 

Children have time and inclination to 

Listen to old folks round the night fire?

.

The burial mounds and dolmens 

Scattered across our island are

Not our own; the céide fields and

Golden torcs were of a different folk

Who we replaced: pushed out; or who

Simply upped one day and walked away.

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I have been fairly quiet these last few weeks. Hope all are well.

I am reading Barry Lopez’z book Horizon. It’s not an easy book to read, but an important one. It provides food for many thoughts and one of the was this, that we should know more about our ancestors than we do, and perhaps its because they are not our ancestors at all…

I have been writing a little – a few more poems to post soon – and working through some new chapters of my major work in progress, Palu and the Pyramid Builders.. which relies a little on Archaeology, and a lot on my imagination of what a certain ancient civilisation might have been like..