a pendant reaches across the millennia

a touch of the shaping

as I cross to our outbuilding to put something in?

take something out? I can’t remember,

my eye catches a hint of form,

the form echoes a piece of wood 

that swivels around a nail,

a common trick to hold a door closed, 

or release it to open,

I pick it up with mild interest,

I like to appreciate the natural world and its patterns

and to appreciate finding what shapes don’t fit in,

I feel human touch in a path, the placing of rocks,

bits of metal, glass, ceramic on the land,

any fragments of earlier stories

that, like the memories of the Library at Alexandria,

remind us that today was preceded by yesterdays,

each full of purpose and effort

that draw us but which we can touch 

no more than to hold a ghost,

in my hand an artifact reveals itself, 

a gray flat-backed shaped piece of soapstone,

in the basic form of a native spearpoint,

blunted off at the end,

a perfectly formed round hole right in the middle,

a carved indented neck so that leather string can hold it

as it could lie against the bosom to adorn, to protect, to remember?

I imagine the long, long years this pendant

rests atop sandy topsoil above piedmont clay,

here on this hill that first found a modern house half a century ago,

here where I’ve found spearpoints that reach toward

the first times humans found and appreciated

how the world could hold them here for a time,

I ache to know the man or woman who stood here with this pendant

and I ache to know what it meant for him, for her,

a local expert at the state university writes that they have never seen its like

in all the painstakingly recovered, preserved, 

and catalogued artifacts from the last 10,000 or so years,

my best guess is that around 8000 years ago 

the pendant was made, worn, and lost,

I honor the maker,

the craftsman, the artist,

and I seek for him,

I think he still lives in how he was able 

to take his vision and write in stone what mattered to his soul,

and who now speaks to me through the pendant that still is,

and that lies in my hand, in my heart, and in my soul.

by Henry H. Walker

November 3, ’13