Poems that you love

[ellajam]

Here is another one by an old workshop friend:

Neanderthal Bone Flute
by Rose Kelleher

“...if it really is a flute, it provides significant evidence that Neanderthals may have been the equal of Homo Sapiens in the evolution of humankind.”
                      — Wikipedia.com, Divje Babe

Let it be a flute. Let some young man,
perhaps red-haired, have carved it just for fun.
Or better yet, to serenade someone:
one of the jut-chinned girls, not of his clan,
a stranger from the east. And let his genes
thrive still in solitary types, the shy
who fidget when you look them in the eye,
the tongue-tied, who must woo by other means.

Ignore the new genetic tests that say
the girl rejected him, that winter came
and spear could not compete with bow and arrow;
that want, or slaughter, whittled him away
because his ways and ours were not the same.
Let bone be flute, the music in our marrow.

mmmmmm