ROMANCING THE ARCHAEOLOGIST

Kyle Torr

“Romancing the Archaeologist”

I.

The sight and sound, the smell and colors,

And whatever else the Archaeologist uncovers…

Remains of an ancient Time, idolized by so many,

yet unknown to all,

The potsherd cooking vessel, the fragment of bone,

The Tiger Lady buried beneath her own ancestral home

and clutching her child who was never to have grown,

The Faces, Tragedies, Triumphs,

hewn together in stone.

The dusting of rocks on an outline of mud,

Caked to eternity, bricks of the blood,

And a rotting cypress log in the wall, like a stud,

Holds back the layers of a whole world in Flood.

The Archaeologist, bent over to sweat on these graves,

for the benefit of the families whose memory he saves,

And the truth of the History is all that he craves,

(when the rest of us patrons never seem to behave).

There were Bombings yesterday, it was a close shove,

There are Bombings tomorrow, for the Transept and Nave,

To wipe the Faces clean and free of the pagans and slaves,

Of the voice of other Gods,

The president braves.

Behind the Gold Army, and the Brazen Old Bulls,

No Magnet of Earth could ever hope to pull

any salvage from the rubble, any savage innocent from trouble,

The Archaeologist searches for the scratch in the Stubble,

like a marble from Elgin,

his life’s work stolen,

the fine arts dashed,

the military emboldened.

(October 2020)

II.

But to romance the archeologist, 

the media swoons,

Through centuries’ wrath and the covetous spoon,

Borne from the Bronzes they took from the Palace,

The story was scrambled and Hollywood ran

to capture the screen and glorify spoils,

While the modern Archaeologist suffers and toils,

Does he fight today to undo that pain?

While destruction continues on the grounds that he gains…

Will the memories remain when completely unearthed

for whom it pertains to judge its worth?

Then a cold reality dawns over the hill that was scraped,

And just one moral notion was allowed to escape,

Encumbered, alone, no-name in this game,

The archaeologist ponders his marginal mark:

The native history left untold,

their lifelines claimed and hung abroad,

lynched in London with velvet ropes,

Or paywalled in New York.

(October 2022)