Stuart Rawlinson #80 - The Archaeologists Will Report

I

Scrape
But never reach bedrock
Record
Each layer
Minutely. Remember every
Detail
On the drafting film
Seconds, minutes
Lifetimes

Test pits turn to craters
Bottomless and steep
The sheer walls graph
The big moments of
Fire, flood and invasion

In the laboratory
Silent white coats
Separate pollen from spores
Classified and logged
By species and age

Post-holes like shadows
Only show from one side
Three in a line is not
Random. Temples are imagined




II

Boy, aged 10, in reversible
T-shirt, unimpressed or
Unsure how standing stones
On a hill can mean
So much more
Or less
To a tardy future




III

There is fog on the A303
Thick in the hollows gives way to
Brief moments of sky
As the liminal road
Lifts over moving boundaries.

Between two lives – ancient
Modern, and creating new
Old layers of sediment
With every mile and turn




IV

Is it possible
That these stones were erected
Exactly for this?
This moment, this island
Of time, projected back
Millennia into a thought
A spur, a determination
Post-ordained and flipped
More easily than the lifting
Of Megaliths?

The Archaeologists will report
In time