Libation
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
Solutrean bison – By Museo de Altamira y D. Rodríguez, CC BY-SA 3.0
I sprinkled my best wine with dust from tombs,
Presuming that concoction would bring grave
Results as striking as the secret rooms
With brightly solemn paintings in the nave
Of Altamiran man’s shamanic art.
But now I have some coffins in my mind
And more importantly inside my heart.
I think with shame my younger self was blind
To death and then much less to how its force
Might never be approximated in
Dark poems. Crudely, innocently coarse
Esthetic thoughts were polychromic sin
At best. I think that Solutrean men
Knew death and art more perfectly back then.