Best Archaeological Poems
My dream holiday on an Island so far away
I’ve wanted to go there for many a day
‘Kon-Tiki’ film by Thor Heyerdahl caught my eye
Now Easter Island is a destination I dearly want to try
A journey, which would take me over land and sea
But to reach my destination would be a dream for me
Easter Island is located in the Pacific Ocean
I’d need to fly to Santiago de Chile then to Hanga Roa
The Rapa Nui tribe used to inhabit there
No trees are on the Island – isn’t that rare!
At one stage the Island suffered deforestation
This could explain the total devastation
The Island is famed for its archaeological sites
Its monumental statues cause many delights
‘Moai’ are the famous statues with oversized heads
They rest on rock altars ‘Ahu’ their own comfy beds
These incredible stone carvings are heavy and some are very tall
The largest at 86 tonnes would have been a nightmare to haul
To view all the statues I would stay for a day or two
I do hope one day my wish will finally come true
Contest Take a Vacation
Sponsor Lin Lane
02~03~16
I am here on an archaeological quest,
to satisfy many a curious mind's request
for knowledge on antiques and artifacts
of Egypt's long extinct historical facts,
in treasured sands buried, like gold mines earnestly
sought for in stories shrouded in mythology.
With a large contingent just as curious as I,
hardly daunted by curses, but with shoulders high,
we went to the field, the sun baking us chaps
to a baker's delight. With our rumpled maps,
we searched every clue, and were bitten perhaps
by a million flies. Getting relief from sunless skies
in times of fair weather, whilst hoping something lies
in the depths of the hot sands for our very eyes
to see. With my tools by hard work and search worn out,
I brushed to full view, the tomb, brilliantly carved out
of young blue blooded Tut, regally laid to rest.
To my wearied colleagues, I spoke in real earnest:
'To exhume the past, we are here at last.'
Form:
My room is a mess - it's an archaeological record of boredom.
Christmas, Christmas, come on Christmas.
It's 4 days 'til Christmas. Why don't I go to my room and do NOTHING??
The clock ticking sounds like a large horse clomping over cobble stones.
Last year there were wall-to-wall parties - so many that you had to carry a change of clothes with you.
In 2020 there's nothing to do - but I don't have to tell YOU (my reader). Except for the whole school thing. Nothing to do but study. I read, on that webber-net thing that 38% of students are failing.
Because of the pandemic - oh, not that virus monster - the boredom pandemic - the London-tower-lonely state of slow-motion distress that’s invisibly gripped us all.
Can we hold on people? The hard-won, delicious truth is that there’s hope. Vaccines - a bunch of 'em. Is it possible to let worries go this season and simply treasure our lives?
Just this month we have or had Hanukah, Kwanza, Festivus.
Hopefully, you made wild, monkey-love on December 14th - that was "International Monkey Day" - I couldn't join you - of course - but I'm just sayin. =]
Look it up - almost every day is some kind of celebration or invent your own - if Ice Cream Day, Lemon Cupcake Day, Go Caroling Day or Crossword Puzzle Day don't do it for ya.
The important gifts, this year, are fun, attention and love.
Islam Burning
In deep purple flame
Stapled to the cross
While the peasants yell below
Demon demon demon
Black flags rise
Hearts fail to beat
Humanity has lost this score
The axe swings in the air
Freedom at last
From Islam’s beasts
My head tumbles into the dust
I am now an icon of the history I so loved
I am Khalid al-Asaad
Your humble servant of antiquity
Aug 19, 2015
In memory of Khalid al-Assad murdered by Islamic cowards.
Islamic State militants beheaded a renowned antiquities scholar in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and hung his mutilated body on a column in a main square of the historic site because he apparently refused to reveal where valuable artefacts had been moved for safekeeping.
According to Syrian state news agency Sana and the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Asaad was beheaded in front of dozens of people on Tuesday in a square outside the town’s museum. His body was then taken to Palmyra’s archaeological site and hung from one of the Roman columns.
“Al-Asaad was a treasure for Syria and the world,” his son-in-law, Khalil Hariri, told the Associated Press. “Why did they kill him? Their systematic campaign seeks to take us back into pre-history. But they will not succeed.”
Himmelsscheibe von Nebra
Von Raubgräbern beschädigt
Relikt aus der Bronzezeit
Abbild von Mond und Plejaden
Bronze, Goldblech und Malachit
Ein einmaliges Artefakt
Jetzt im Museum von Halle
The Sky Disc of Nebra
Damaged by swag diggers
A fine relict from Bronze Age
An image of moon and Pleiades
Bronze, golden metal and malachite
What an unique artifact
Now in the museum of Halle
El Disco de Cielo de Nebra
Dañado por excavadoras de robo
Un vestigio fino de Edad de Bronce
Una imagen de luna y Pleiades
Bronce, metal de oro y malaquita
Artefacto tan único
Ahora en el museo de Halle
Note. The Sky Disc of Nebra (Saxony-Anhalt, Germany) is a bronze disk with applications of
gold and apparently show astronomical phenomenons and symbols of religious application
areas. It is presumed to be the worldwide oldest concrete image of the sky and one of the
most important archaeological finds from the Bronze Age. The disk was found by swag
diggers in July 1999 in a stone chamber on the Mittelberg near the town of Nebra. It is
now part of the "Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte Sachsen-Anhalt Halle" (State Museum of
Prehistory Halle). The circular disk is approx. 12.6 in in diameter and about 0.18 in
thick in the centre and 0.07 in at the rims. Based on associated finds (a bronze sword,
two axes, a chisel and fragments of spiralled bangles), the disk was probably buried in
1600 B.C. and made between 2100 and 1700 B.C.
Details and pictures can be seen on http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himmelsscheibe_von_Nebra
I am reading
"Democracy in Black"
by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
but continue reconstructing this title
"Hypocrisy in Only White."
Because
when I let my memory
look back to my own self-interests in history
as archaeological digging and prying and discovery,
adventure and curiosity
of my internal ecological development,
I reweave back
through still on-going matriarchal lines
that include,
are shared with,
anyone capable of reading
and comprehending
these words of regenerating memory.
Back
to darker
denser
richer genes and memes
of cooperative to still thrive today,
saving competitions for survival moments.
Back to
better to prey together
side by side
as neanderthal brothers and sisters
than to grow predative
against each other.
This Golden Rule
of dark Afro-Eurasian
equatorial resonant depth
of historical origin
in normative play
at least until we substitute capitalism's
supremacist agendas
for rationalism's ego-ecocentric
reweaving memory
of this original Earth Mom
magical and mysterious
then worshiped and danced
ritualed and cooperative ownership co-governing,
then more modern radical eccentricities
forgetting our shared matriarchal
regenetic
memory of dualdark
hypocrisies of merely white inferiority
complexes
disease
dissonance
despair of remaining fully
who we together are,
where we have been
predating history
where we could return
each morning
with greatest polyphonic joy.
To paraphrase David Holmgren
(Permaculture, p. 113)
Containers were one essential organic innovation
necessary for this cooperative agrarian revolution.
Opportunities to refill organically produced bodies
are enormous
transitioning into recycling energy descent
for shared cooperative memory.
Reimaging full organic containers
is far better than sending us
away and down and out for recycling.
Most official ecopolitical waste reduction strategies
place little emphasis
on organic reuse refilling re-educating
deep ecologically learning containers,
or confuse WinWin refueling,
reweaving,
with capitalism's WinLose recycling,
switching productive containers
into merely consuming eventual empties,
bleached-out white-washed faded hypocrisies
of purest supremacy against nothing
deeply densely
richly resonantly valued.
He saw it in my eye's,
a little sprinkle
from the pines-
little crinkles in the vines,
what a pencil
drawing up signs,
nobody else could see have seen me at that time.
It was time for revolution,
people acting so fine,
but they are only here for their crimes,
so what is all this?
A loop hole,
or an archaeological find?
In the trees-
there is terror of the season of the mind,
makes me prideful
to the resistant,
and the christened,
...but not to my sisters and brothers alike!
Jesus was right,
always-
just like your anger is fright,
always, its all fright,
spring loaded contraptions angled real sly,
shooting rocks and bribes,
squaring off the moon-
magnifying the sky...
Add two meteorites,
and a generation of the blind,
and you will have my mind,
flippant and fly,
you will carry the eye's,
welcome and kind,
dragging a bag full of wine,
wearing your check near your heart,
and walking with chime,
such a scene to be drawn by musical lines,
to refine that little unwind.
my meme replacement therapy
is going quite well
because I can't handle everything thrown at me
everything is a lot and GIGO to boot
the fibrous growth in my ear
said that the future signals us in some way
maybe coded glances wink wink
but we're not sure of the spelling
a real spectacle of setbacks
a bleeding archaeological phantom
engineered to manipulate
moving my pen in gleeful jerks
with a genteel appetite for mayhem
which is why I am now sharing
the secret of life with you
ready
mind is derivative
well that's it
looks like I've blown my cover
if this sounds like propaganda then it is
now to get on to the meatier part
first a matter of indexing
last a matter of indexing
buzzards are circling my guardian bottle of muscatel
and a couple of robins too
a tempestuous tune in a teapot
from follow the bouncing ball
to Rocky Horror
occult syntax as a 2nd language
and that was the last surface
he ever palpated
because the sages are perpetually boring
but have good circulation and a ruddy face
with long lists of abjurations as usual
one of them spoke just now
sending me in to negotiate
because I have a snake pit for a soul
on further reflection it turns out
I have many souls
most of them severe critics
several are wind up toys
academic or practical you decide
existence is both diagrammatic
and ready to throw a punch
in an ancient tangle of inconsequentials
well perplexity is the root of all humor
how is it that some ideas
are interpreted by other ideas for example
but whatever you do
never let an ideology sit in court
we know too much to be stupid any longer
From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon
http://tinyurl.com/nhfk6dr
Winds of change blow in time’s course clear
waft from an unseen end to unknown another
the momentum they gather from the power
the history gives, it goes on increasing ever,
the direction they receive from the message
the current events provide can’t be altered,
the aim they read on social landscape page
people delicately design can’t be changed.
Civilizations blew away in the destined gale
the Indus valley turned into a great desert,
empires collapsed on time in the gusty squall
lie scattered in archaeological sites and in art,
all ordained to meet the change from the start.
The mankind sheds the unwanted old grime
like the dry leaves of autumn the winds sweep
and bury under thick dust of the ageing time.
Indomitable spirit rises from the dust deep
new generations of belief and value emanate
that survive as long as they can strongly defy
the forces of fated change the winds generate,
the strike of destined wrath time arrows apply
transforming fast and invisibly the core insipid
of the traditional society of integrity and unity
into a new deceptive one that seems steeped
permanently in intolerance and in hostility,
infusing sense of change that gradually sips in,
traditional concepts of living slowly recede
families and relationships disintegrate within
to morph into the present-day fragile breed
desperately designed to meet rather blindly
the demands current times make irrationally.
The shape and the space of mind’s frame alters
with changing pictures it holds but doesn’t know
the time and the people that are constant movers
displayed in the kaleidoscopic everlasting show
the winds of change visibly perform as they blow.
If winds of change blow too strong and abrasive
everything on way crumbles beyond recognition,
so savagely they gust nothing survives to retrieve
the wreckage can’t be swept aside, it stays on
for everything drags everything into the ruins.
August 31, 2017.
It is a field composed of four times more stones than grass
with a spectacular traditional residency, making its habitat almost homogenous
is this global historic street light, shinning with well spread beams.
Through its inventions of western theories of tragedy and comedy,
major mathematical principles, histiography and western literature,
political science, the Olympics and western philosophy.
All well capped by the majestic influence from its creation of democracy.
Setting up as passengers of a flight travel to the past,
the suppressed heavily added to the density of its people.
Waving with an open hand and fingers well extended
hits the mind with similar intensity to telling an irish “smell ya ma”.
The puff of breath through pursed lips and the shade of blue
stand in mythical beliefs of protection against evil.
The unbelievable stamina of the Hoplite soldiers
all sum up the beautiful historic landmark of a nation
once defined by thousands of different quarreling colonies.
The leading producer of sea sponges
with its ships more than twice as much as its continental fleets
and a global accolade of accumulating archaeological Museums.
Despite being heavily wounded by financial meltdown;
and still drinking from the deadly taste of its black soup
its highlighted prominence in history, mathematics and philosophy
together with the cultural swag of its first world features
attract yearly interested sight-seekers much more than its inhabitants
which is an enough statement, to the testament of its global charm.
Australian Ancient Depths Of Time
Under deserts rusting tides of red
Mountains once collapsed themselves into the clay
Became flat lands stilted while sun hung ornate on the humble quiet
Beauty remained unobserved, unobstructed, ageless
At this point in time my team and I, consisting of two guides
Walked gently along soft earth near a simple gorge
Mules and archaeological tools fell through to darkness
Deep in the hole one man tumbled, crippled, died
The mules too met an ugly fate as well
My other man and I survived
Crawled for hours through a narrow passage in the underworld
In the labyrinth of black, accompanied by barely breathable air
Fear and hunger took hold
Our mental faculties began to fail
With no way out, we struggled on
By quirk or chance we happened on an open chamber
To stand, to glance, to reconnoiter an unknown civilization
Covered by time, embraced by centuries safe keeping
Thick vases found in sandy walls housed oils
I had matches and some rope to light our way at last
Other vases filled with beans and herbs unearthed by us
Treasures to save us from starvation!
Olive oils tasted nasty, black beans were worse
But Australia’s hidden depths were fascinating finds
We tied ropes around our new supplies, dragged them behind
The maze, the cave, gave us many bones and pottery for exploration
We hope the ancients will forgive us for eating all their food
I think they no longer need it in the tomb
8/28/14 Contest - poem you have not entered in a past contest # 11
Put your fingers into kalihi*,
Kalihta.
There is nothing there.
But it is so beautiful.
Your fingers – kalihi…
A fresco.
It remained of ???ss??**
in a boundless sea.
And my eyes.
*a kind of an oblong goblet of
Late Minoan epoch
** Knossos – a great archaeological site in Greece
He ceaselessly wandered across the vast desert,
with only a bottle of water. According to his archaeological
knowledge, it was claimed that gods, with fiery chariots,
roamed across the world, six thousand years ago; a period
that people read the stars, and knew where gods hailed.
Legend has it that a magical papyrus scroll, illustrating a map to gods' abode,
was hidden in an Obsidian Pyramid, that glowed in the day. As the Egyptian
Kingdom collapsed, an evil sorcerer threatened to steal it, but Isis hid it in a vault,
in the Obsidian Pyramid. "It's not the sorcerer who's a threat now, but the Nazis!", the
English archaeologist speaks in his heart.....
Name: Teddy Kimathi
Contest title: IN THE WIND
Date: 15/09/2014
Scattering spellbound in search of this utopia
Minds-eye in shortfall dissects one's monopoly
Through no choice of own approach it sloppily,
Exude to a position such promised, Ethiopia-
As the diminishing dream on landscapes ensemble
The probate illusion of Queen of Egypt's daughter
Who proceeds through this escapade of slaughter
And who am I forgiving one or either? I tremble.
Having reached two thousand years without absorb
Of having travelled miles, indeed was bronze;
Such ghastly size these statues, long lost sons
With indications seen through my crystal orb.
Precious filling educated, siphoning the syllable
Retracted.., words of larger scale were of faith
Those who muttered sounding, Queen Merneith,
-Alluring dynasties as Anedjib's was, as a fable-
Engulfed over as subsidiary benefactors cannibal
Over some archaeological find, for at the centre,
No godly size can interpret that this magenta,
Haze of gross sufficient was the alluring spectacle.
Expedient gauge eclipse this as the inferno;
And making this voyage with the help of a globule,
Whose crystal awareness has forgotten the rule,
That language hosts devise quoted, 'quid pro quo'.
Myths and hypothesis evolve through time.
From the Garden of Eden and before …
Until the undetermined end, men indulge themselves.
Speculation upon speculation, ideas arise and fall.
Hoarding the past *like shards on a battlefield.
**Dreaming, deliberating, debating ideas…seeking truths.
Reckoning the present in terms of antiquity.
Archaeological finds ***dance upon the past.
Today languishes into a myriad of tomorrows.
Wisdom flickers like a firefly sparkling the dark.
Illumination hides amid darkness of yesterday.
And wisdom is veiled like the sun during a solar eclipse.
Age upon Age; culture upon culture; faith upon faith,
Man has sought to explain his existence.
Thought upon thought, experiment upon experiment
Man’s mind methodically meanders amid collected facts.
Between the Creations, the Big Bang, and the appearance of life…
Beyond the imagination until the apocalypse
Men dissect creatures, theories, and facts…interpreting.
Weaving a web of logic to bind the beginning to the soul.
Hoping, discovering, discerning, deciding, debating…forever.
And thus, continues, the myths and hypothesis of man.
Copyright: Dane Ann Smith-Johnsen
September 24, 2014
* Similie
**Alliteration
*** Personification.
Written for Debbie Guzzie's Designed by Devise Poetry Contest.