Now (9/26/09)

The Neolithic peoples in Iraq buried their elders in clay jars in separate rooms,
And about the bodies bent in fetal position wrapped reed mattings sealed with bitumen,
but the bones of others were haphazardly piled in other rooms or unmarked jars.
The children buried in jars were given cups of clay for drinking in the afterworld.

In the larger rectangular houses in which rooms of gypsum walls and clay floors
Embraced courtyard or stable, the dead were buried beneath the floors themselves.
Some hamlets threw pottery with geometric decoration; some cultivated emmer wheat
Or gathered wild lentils and stored them; some made sickles and cutting-tools from volcanic glass

Or the obsidian scattered on hillsides. Some butchered gazelles and aurochs, tanning the hides;
Some fashioned rams’ horns or bones into sewing needles or spoons for soups of legume and acorn;
some strapped their flint sickles onto handles that were branches of sumac or oak;
Others wedged arrow-heads onto spears of ash; some stabbed away at the neck arteries

Of plentiful red deer with knives of horn; above their altars hung the skulls of wild oxen
Who’d bellowed at them from an open field before. The eyes of their statues resemble coffee-beans;
And the pornographically grotesque fertility idols, their limbs striped and ornamented,
were amulets that presided over child-bearing or fertility; another hand was always needed

For scything wild grain in the fields or grinding it; for who else would water the asses or feed
the subjugated wild hogs? Near marshes, a hand waved in air a moment might bring down
Game birds that darkened the sky with their clattering wings, thus the squiggling of drakes
Animating the decorations of clay jars the shards of which are tripped upon in this battle-space,

The ostrakons beneath the treads of Abrams tanks. No harps, no tabors or cymbals then,
no libraries to burn, only naked human voices ossified in the open mouth of a diorite statue.
(Black jongleur, court singer, scribe?) Beneath the tells, monumental alabaster jars
Withstood the pressures of the earth and sky. But that was then, and this is now.