Today you get a poem, or prose with line breaks, about an archaeological dig and what happened there. Please take this post with a grain of salt, or sand, and enjoy.
East of Winslow, a tarp tied at six points pumps like an enormous drum
Wind does not stop, not even to breathe,
Hot Arizona dust-blower from the north, the land of the dead.
A crew fifteen feet down in the pit removes
Dry ochre soil an eighth of an inch at a time.
Below the tarp, masonry walls and ancient floors
Are beaten with bare feet long gone,
Strands of dark hair worked into hardpack around
Broken jars, kernels of charcoal, flakes and stone points,
And firepits lensed like dark eyes in the strata.
Room on room, people built atop each other over centuries
Where buckets of matrix are now hauled up for screening on a desert hilltop.
Katsina thunderheads rocket over the San Francisco peaks
One horizon away.
At lunch against a shield of greasewood a story is told,
Digging a New Mexico kiva, a ceremonial chamber, they found
Charred remains of many people
Arms pitched up at the elbows, skulls blackened into their sockets.
Data is what they seek.
But we all know what this place was about.
Whatever happened here,
Unspeakable.
As the story went, it was a calm summer day,
Like a bell yet to be rung, not a whiff of breeze
When a dust devil roared in from nowhere.
Everything went up, clip boards and work gloves.
The tarp over the kiva ripped from its grommets straight into the air
To come down in the desert like a crashed plane
Followed by stunned silence where scientists all at once
Knew exactly what this was about.
A story told at lunch at a dig
About the unthinkable that keeps happening.
At Homolovi, the wind won’t stop.
The tarp prevents the dig from filling with blowsand.
Trowels and brushes reach the lowest layer, a flagstone floor fit together
Smooth as a jigsaw puzzle. Ceremonial chamber, we call it.
On the floor, the last thing to happen here, are the disarticulated bones of a dead person,
A story that ended, not yet over.
Which would mean a call to a tribal council, paperwork, controversy.
Respect to the next of kin, a thousand years away.
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act:
No longer can archaeology freely wield the bones of the dead.
Instead of digging up the person,
Tomorrow the pit will be backfilled, closed off,
Leaving the Dead One in place, in situ, a gift of silence
Where I keep whispering, shhh, we were never here…
Tools navigate around bones, careful not to touch,
Seeing what artifacts might be found before backfilling.
These are not grave offerings but trash, midden, backfill from 800 years ago.
Fifteen painstaking feet down,
The woman digging beside me is pissed after all this work.
She’s from Mexico, an archaeologist used to temples and backhoes.
She says Mexico has different laws about the dead.
Tribes are archaeology, ancestry made for storage.
Whenever she starts to expose another bone, she says, “God damn you!”
Waking the skeleton
While threads of hourglass sand pour in from the edges of the tarp,
Fine-grained mounds building around us, the wind
Putting this dig slowly back to sleep.
Painting: Vincent van Gogh, Oil on Canvas, Paris: Winter, 1887 – 88
Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Europe
Can feel the wind and smell the earth. Dust devils herald the chindi. Well said, well done.
I think I will copy, paste, print a copy of this poem and put it inside my copy of Apocalyptic Planet. It seems as though it should fit well in that book of awareness and awakening.