Everybody is supposed to be dead,
to never say anything or want anything ever again.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Time happened so long ago.
The milkman's note is deep carved
dead-language, symbolic, on the door frame.

Evidence for breakfast can still be sifted
from the archaeological layer:
people ate toasted grains, bread,
fruit preserved in storage jars.

They may have wanted extra pints
which the milkman didn't leave.

If I still spoke that language
I would pull messages from shards,
write a learned paper, a coffee table book,
show how civilisation faltered
a voice was raised
a door was slammed...

It was all over long ago --
I make notes with detachment.

I get a haunting picture of a long absent Creator, who has forgotten the language and much else about what he neglectfully made eons before.

Love the feeling sensed from the read of this. A meddling thought, please discard as appropriate, but my senses want to change S4 to:

If I still spoke that language,
I would piece a message
back together, write


Excellent,

larry
a coffee table book.

i'm going to leave this here for a
while to allow others to comment;
then, i'm going o pick this.

i enjoyed.

tiko

i'm not known for my patience
or my memory.

to picks.

tiko

fine write.  Love the milkman S with the "may have wanted" and "didn't leave" image, and how that somehow bends so well to the "voice raised" and "door slammed" lines. 

i like larry's suggestion above.  one way or another "shards" seems out of date.  i'm more often wrong then right, however.

ld

Thanks Tom...

and thanks Tiko!!!

Larry / Lynn - "shards" is one of those words over- and mis-used in poetry (I know at least one contemporary poet who considers it banned) but in this context, e.g. archaeology, it is unusually 100% correct.  Shards are pieces of broken pot, and very much the archaeologist's stock-in-trade...

Ian