The Legacy of Lascaux
Of course, another rule that I had set for myself at the beginning was that poetry was poetry and the blogs were the blogs, two entirely separate writing projects, but I am not just violating that rule, I am tossing it out entirely.
This post will catch me up to today’s date and I think I can maintain a blog a day after that, but we still don’t have April’s book of the month up yet, and it’s all proving to be quite a bit more work than I imagined.
So, this is a sonnet I wrote today. There may be more in future.
The hungry tribe were huddled in the cave
Sheltered from the weather and the lions
They were timid more than they were brave
They had to be, to live in those environs
When someone got some gunk upon their hand
A bit of ochrous clay and slightly damp
They rubbed it off against the nearest wall
And noticed that it left a ragged stamp
Then, in the light of fire and dimmed by smoke
They molded it with fingers and with sticks
Perhaps, at first they thought it was a joke
A game, perhaps, a sort of magic trick
They had time and little else to do
And so the game became a form of art
Images of animals they knew
Both fanned their hunger and enflamed their hearts
And once they’d killed the bison in their brains
Then they could kill the bison on the plains
Once there’s enough of them, of course, they will be recycled as a book of the month.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
I like this, a lot. Never thought of it exactly that way, but could be. I would disagree with the line, “They had time and little else to do,” though.
I think of Lascaux and similar cave sites and ancient carvings as confirmation that humans have long felt a need to express themselves artistically, spiritually and emotionally, and we have proof that it has been so for at least 40,000 years. I want to believe peoplel have been doing such things for as long as people have been human. Maybe even before.
Could neanderthals have expressed themselves this way? Our ancestors? I think so.