A Stone Jug
A bulldozer digging a pond
on my mother's family's land
unearths two stoneware jugs
buried four feet in the ground,
one broken and one intact.
Who put them there? When? Why?
We suppose, but can't explain.
Those who have come and gone
are gone. How lost to us
they are whose lives passed here
in the sun's beauty and sorrow!
And who in a hundred years
will know us as we are
in our present living and dying
here under the very sun, lost
to the future as to the past?
-Wendell Berry
The more I discover about The Future (that the world will end in 2012, snakes of zero thickness will continue to eat themselves, there will be no fresh water, holodecks will be the next Lynagh's (or we will go to Lynagh's via holodexing!)), the more I find myself thinking about the past.
What about time travel to the past? No way. I think the first time travelers to the past will be fun-ruiners, spying on everybody with wide eyes and writing things down and taking pictures with their futuristic image-capturers and always suggesting better ways to do things.
So I wrote a poem about the things I've been thinking about for the past few hours here in a coffee shop in Louisville.
So I wrote a poem about the things I've been thinking about for the past few hours here in a coffee shop in Louisville.
Rumors
And who in a hundred years
will know us as we are
in our present living and dying
here under the very sun, lost
to the future as to the past?
(Wendell Berry, "A Stone Jug")
This is what the first man thought
as he pierced the skin of the first roaming animal
and watched her children scatter
as she sank to the earth.
This is what the first woman wondered
as she dropped the seeds of the first fruits
and watched the sprouts bloom
into a tree she wouldn't outlive.
They pondered the assurance of this constant renewal aloud,
quietly, in a language we no longer understand,
a simplicity we have forgotten over time,
as instantly as a twig is stamped, snapped.
This is an assurance growing steadily weaker
as we forget the future, as the land ever changes,
as it is dug and excavated,
developed and exhausted.
This is what we know:
only what has been passed down.
Stories and symbols,
artifacts and imprints.
Still, they are only rumours.
2 comments:
Can you start a poem with a different poem? I mean, is that legal?
"All those memories, lost, like tears, in the rain."
today edwin, his brother, and i went to the city cemetary for day of the dead, looking for his grandmothers tomb, where we would lay flowers for a woman who I will know nothing more about than stories edwin tells me. we didnt find it, but we did find a tomb from 1830 of a woman who we have no knowledge of, and, since she had no flowers, since no one remembered her, we left them for her. and i felt sad that the second or third generation probably no one leaves you flowers at all.
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