Among the world’s most pressing ruins
artifacts come rising as phoenixes
parting their form from the fierce driven wind
and sand that whirls around in its dying
hour of enjambment with earth and sky.
Here, now, we glimpse a masterwork divine,
the immense weight bearing architecture;
The lintel at the Treasury Of Atreus
that both amazes and makes us a fool,
is suspended, accepted, and controversial,
but any’ with their beating heart can see
the contradictory enigmas hidden jewel,
the canary in depths of the past’s stony keep.
You’ve asked me, what the sphinx is waiting for
in its ancient riddle of limestone repose,
about the alignments in the Giza Plateau
seen backwards-drifting towards Orion’s belt–
the once polished pyramids surface know this.
Time and its carcass have eroded the life we had built.
The same sands that bore the Seven Wonders
now actively cover up over our ancestral homes.
At Delphi’s famous dramatic amphitheater,
the Roman dogs and accidental thieves
of our earthen heritage quarried up their prayers
to ancient and sometimes all too human gods.
I’m no Princeton expert, was never meant to scrape
the sands away from academia’s financial sleep
or slow the politician’s budgetary benchmark’s
ceaseless creep into the study of antiquity.
I have only my words and my art to tell you
about human genomes and the stretching of time,
about the science behind the Homo Sapien,
Neanderthal, and Donisovan people’s kind.
In the annals of the peoples of the world
and in the memories and the hearts of those
who lived much closer, the riddle was answered–
but Oedipus’s answer does not suffice
the missing lines, swallowed by ravenous sand.
I have only to tell you about a massive avenue
that goes in curves and snakes through Chile and Peru,
longer than China’s Wall, and drawn out over the land
to connect all Incan temples and polygonal sprawl.
Like Machu Peachu and Cuzco the bedrock joins,
as mason, the Human and Donisonvan kind
to a record of ingenuity seen through
the kaleidoscope of time and the impact of asteroids.
The channeled Scablands in Eastern Washington State
form forks and branches of a world remade in fire
and floods that scraped and scabbed the land ‘till oceans rose
four hundred feet, and we’ve only the stones to see
and the mythologies the people kept on tongue.
The archaeology might as well be a thousand leagues
submerged beneath the sea from off Cuba to Yanagoni.
The Carolina Bays point to cataclysm,
as do the Nebraskan Rainwater Basins tips;
The dappled and dimpled surface ablaze with ice
and fire from an asteroid that nearly killed us.
We’ve now the tools precise enough to seed
minds with such accuracy as to remake the world,
If only we would be open enough to drink
from mythology, stone, and the briny sea.
There are ruins built upon the backs of megalithic stones,
and I tell you that the weathered paws of the Sphinx know this;
that Baalbek and the Temple of Bacchus groan out their age
and denounce the modern scholars Roman naming and rape.
Under the columns and setting sun, the once great city,
Heliopolis comes crumbling out. Elemental chaos,
Atum, and Ra giving fully over to thousands of tons.
The expectant blocks of an unknown and talented race
The Stone of the Pregnant Woman, that bares the babe
in its monumental architecture that predates the first plow.
One only needs to go to Gobekli Tepe to see
the origins of man’s megalithic past bursting forth
from rounded belly with heavy stone heaved up the stone
courses and circles of man’s ancient grasp, purposely hid
and buried in land—known forever as Potbelly Hill.
One only needs to hide something they want to save.
The helical drill marks found in the granite holes
amid Egyptian tools and relics of the day
speak volumes to those who’d seek their course
around in spirals about the core with string.
The bronze-age chiseled stone, chipped and fitted over
the hardest black boxes—quarried in granite and quartz;
Forty thousand enduring diorite vessels
found safe under the step pyramids put-ons
of less skilled craftsman stacked up on more–
The names of pharaohs hastily scraped
into the bowls, vases, and boxes from before.
You’ve asked about the mysterious triangular shapes
found stacked in stone around the world’s different coasts,
and I tell you that the age old mythologies speak loads
and heaves stone up on stone upon the oral histories
and time worn hieroglyphic writings of antiquity.
From Noah to every corner of the globe
we hear of floods and a world remade,
and as today Hiawatha Crater is evidence
of when asteroids pocked the land and lit
the forests ablaze–sending small animals
and mega fauna to lye smothered graves.
An asteroid might leave only cut stones
and legends to pierce the sands of time,
so we’d collapse into dark age
as primitives huddled over our fires;
It was six thousand years till Sumer rose
where we invented our mathematics,
where language was more than vocally born,
where primitives harnessed water for food;
after six thousand years huddling in caves,
after six thousand years and a serious dark age,
not like the one with fall of Rome,
but six thousand years surviving on naught
living, dreaming, and wishing for more
only to wander the sands of the Nile
and discover black granite boxes
and many a helpful stone jar to fill with drink
to pass the time while awaiting a pharaoh’s rise.
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The Poetry Of J.P. 