Hotel Naledi
where where O Naledi
a million years before they came
here on the southern savannah
creature of berry wood bone & antelope
had you always haunted
the subterranean world as a sepulchre
with your charred offerings
and your dead or was it just when they came
bigger brained with their sticks & stones
you do not often see each other
you can evade them from the plain
like you they roam in groups
thirty forty no more
you can hide you can conceal
but sometimes come the raids
the raids of the newcomers
you twist & writhe wriggle & crawl
on your belly on your back
through the cavernous fissures of the dark earth
torwards your terminal chamber
together with your contaminated dead
so many moons have passed
more than a hundred years
but what is time on the savannah
they grow strong you grow weak
they are a different germ it won’t be long
this is your shroud
you are bound to the savannah
& they will go on
a million years will be forgotten
& now here in the Dinaledi den
we uncover your fossilised remains
we remake your skeletons
transport your mummified effigies into our age
our brains blew up & shrank back again
though yours tiny as it was
had done as much before we came
but perhaps ours was the disease
that put the world to flame
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times ; at Artvilla.com his publications include
All the Babble of the Souk , Cartoon Molecules and Next Arrivals, collected poems, & Moon selected Audio Textual Poems available at Amazon.com as well as translation of Guadalupe Grande´s La llave de niebla, as Key of Mist and the recently published Tesserae , a translation of Carmen Crespo´s Teselas.
You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author. See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)