Overheard at Table 3: 1500-Year-Old Bones

I thought about the news I’d read
about 1500 year old bones they’d found
in Katy Texas when they were building
connection ramps between I-10 and 99:

how local activists and several Native
American tribes wanted to stop construction
to study the site, most likely a burial site.
They went to the courts,

And the courts said, “Nah! Carry on, folks!”
and so the 1500 year old bones were
packed up into thick black plastic bags
and taken away – somewhere, who knows where,

And I remember trying to imagine the land
as it was, that millennium and half ago,
where human beings walked, and stalked
prey, and ate, loved, lived, and died

and I thought about how we humans
prey, eat, love, live, and die, and kill
each other for land, for power, for
skin, for language, even for no reason at all.

And I see a time, when all of us humans
Have left nothing but our bones buried
In the ground, and some alien race will
Come through the solar system

To prepare the Earth for a connection
Hub for an intergalactic highway
And they will dig up our bones and
Haul them away in thick plastic bags

And then, finally, then,
We will all be equal.

 

 

MR

2023-0308