When The Clay Grows Tall (sample poem)

After the machines have been
and scooped the topsoil in it’s tons
they kneel and lay down their grids
and, hoping that the rain holds off,
begin their excavations.
Spooning out the earth
they chisel and scrape
and brush away the dirt,
and feel in their hands the still-warm soil.
Fragments and artefacts are logged and bagged
and sent off for analysis.
Layer by layer, year by year,
strata by strata they keep digging
until they hit something solid.
Stone, metal or bone.

Those who come after us,
when the clay grows tall
will polish our skulls
and mount our skeletons in museums
to scare children on school tours
and confound creationist preachers
who’ll deny our existence.
The human race is a fabrication they’ll say.
The stuff of myths, nothing more.

Dig deep they will to unearth
the cavernous ruins of banks and shopping malls,
the batholiths of lift shafts,
escalators in our temples of commerce,
the marble halls of the cathedrals
we raised to Mammon.
They will dig too into words and numbers
these stranges shapes,
these riddles, curses on our tomb walls
to find out who and what we were,
to find out what drove us to extinction.
They will decipher the hieroglyphs,
the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s Feast;
FTSE 100, NASDAQ, Nikkei.

Down there in the sediment
astonished they will find
what’s left of our empires.
Prise open the rusted ancient gates
of factories that made nothing
but the flags on putting greens, shoelaces,
the filters for cigarettes.

A mountain of alarm clocks,
a glacier of mobile phones,
an ocean of paper clips.

Copyright Darran Anderson 2005