Excavation

Tell me if you’re game for a little dig

at our history. Not the tourist-trap

grabbing of photo-surface rubble

but a real excavation:

Let’s look at foundation.

 

Smash apart the facade marked “1379,”

bulldoze right through the war’s reparations

(all-new electric, clean-water pipes—

the glossing of horror for a new generation):

Let’s make an excavation.

 

Throw down stone by stone the rotting

temples. Send sandals to museums

and pocket the coins, shut your ears

to the years of blood-screaming conflagration:

Let’s dig the foundation.

 

Auger deep through layers of weapons, potsherds,

bones. Build mountains of mud and sand, crush

ideals and human promise, fossils since time began.

Later we’ll puzzle over fragmentation

or play a game of recalculation.

 

There’s nothing here not damaged, exploded,

shaken, nothing whole to the earth’s core

since we learned greed and hate.

(But tell me you’re game; let’s excavate.)

 

Where is hope’s fountain

that deep well, that rock?

 

We don’t have the machinery to cut it.

 

My first attempt at a Speakeasy prompt: #160.