What survives erasing time?

if you were to vanish,

along with all other humans,

and time had thousands of years

of oxygen and rain and seasons

to work upon all your things,

what would be left 5-10,000 years from now

to give a clue as to who you actually were?

ceramics, glass, stonework, can endure, maybe plastic,

but wood and cloth and paper and much of the metal

no longer will be there

to potentially bridge back to who you were,

roughly 10,000 years ago

humans first populated North America in mass,

when I find a trace of their world on the land

we borrow from the future,

it is of rock: arrowheads, projectile points,

a few potsherds from the last 2000 years or so,

thus, we call their time a "stone age,"

though wood and bone and fabric

would have their stories to tell,

if time had not stilled their voices,

archeologists can recover more of their world

than we common folks can, inferring a lot,

still with empathic projection,

I seek to feel their world,

bring them closer to what I understand

by imagining them with the tool I've found:

making it, using it, losing it,

I found a soapstone pendant with a perfect round hole in it,

and a cache of extraordinary treasures:

projectile points, a chunky stone, scrapers,

lovely pieces of flint and quarts, potsherds,

all within a foot of each other,

next to our rebuilt outbuilding,

revealed because earth was disturbed

and rain from the roof uncovered them,

most times when I find a stone tool,

it makes sense that it was lost,

this cache seems to me to be of choice, of purpose,

thus potentially revealing more of their world

than just a tool by itself:

why did those early peoples choose to leave these treasures here?

the best reason I can so far imagine

is to honor a loved one who died

and was probably buried here,

maybe with the soapstone pendant around their neck,

their time predates the Indigenous people

who still survive in these lands,

the chunky stone and potsherds

take the time of this cache

back 1,000 to 2500 years,

I honor these early people

with my words, with my thoughts, with my love,

I can only begin to know them

but I want them to still live in my heart,

and be treasured in the artifacts on my wall,

we were gifted with time with a Diné elder, a Navajo,

in a tour of Monument Valley,

a place so dry and barren 

it wasn't deemed worth stealing by Anglo culture,

and now the stark beauty of uplifted stone and ubiquitous sand

shouts its glory to all who can hear,

our guide tells us of his grandfather

and how his memory of ancestral songs

takes them back about 600 years

to when his ancestors found this "promised land,"

a land he feel is not his, not ours,

but belongs to each people who find it,

we each borrow it from the future.

by Henry H. Walker

August 8, ‘26