Monday, September 21, 2009
Poem by Larry Robinson
Cave Painting At Font du Gaume
Of course, even his bones
are now dust,
his flowing mane
taken by the wind,
those sturdy hooves
and solid flesh consumed
and reborn in endless forms.
Even so, through two hundred centuries
of darkness and lamplight
he is still running free
across that vast savannah of time.
And the hand that captured,
in a few spare lines
on the limestone wall,
that wild grace,
sending it down through the years -
hand of my ancestor,
hand of our ancestor -
has long since returned
to the formless.
A day will come,
certainly,
when all this
will be gone:
you and I,
the painting,
even the wall,
carved by ages of
drip and flow,
through uplifted memories
of countless tiny beings
who spent their short lives
in that primordial sea.
And yet this beauty -
this grace -
offers itself to us
in this moment,
the only time we have.
Larry Robinson
(picture of cave wall of Lascaux, courtesy of Art Serve)
