what an artifact!

 spirit throbs in stone

The past has long called to me:

how did we get to here?

how did we get to now?

people, long-gone, call to me,

I marvel at the power of their lives,

the greatness of what worked,

the tragedy of what didn't,

such as my direct ancestors who found a way

to enslave others and to enjoy that ill-gotten gain,

it's the minus that stays with me,

my people have been on this continent in the hundreds of years,

Indigenous peoples have been here thousands of years,

their stone tools and weapons call to me

when I find a chip, a flake, a point,

a scraper, a hammer stone, a hand-axe, a chunky stone,

each a lens through which the past reaches to now,

I imagine the maker, crafting a tool that still writes in stone,

and thus endures a part of who they were,

most often the utilitarian seems to speak loudly:

the way to kill an animal,

the way to work the hide,

to crack the nut,

to play a game,

to celebrate a life,

now I have before me, in my hand, a beautifully-crafted artifact,

whose purpose seems to me to be

more of beauty, ceremony, art, spirituality

than of practicality,

the aching heart of its creator shouts at me,

it's like when I find a carefully-constructed rock wall in the Smokies,

its practical purpose to get rocks out of the cornfield,

what drove the makers had the rightness of art to the labor,

not just the utilitarian,

as humans we need to be practical to survive,

as humans we need art to let us speak to what our heart needs,

our life as spirit is captured in this crafted stone.

by Henry H. Walker

February 16, ‘24