Poem for Early JUly

The First Shaman in the World

Here is the skeleton of a middle-aged woman,

Forty-five by some accounts, who had a broken pelvis

And probably limped, and uttered strange words,

So that she stood out from the rest of the mob.

When she died, the people stood in awe;

They buried her, as they normally did,

Scrunched up, back in the foetal position,

Put her back in the womb of the earth.

Then sometime later, they came back,

They just couldn’t leave her alone,

She had been such a wonder, of them

But very different.  Someone shook away the dust.

Now they placed her favourite things,

An eagle feather, an hyena’s bone,

A little bag of something now only dust,

They dropped flowers on her head.

This was, you must remember, long ago,

Twelve thousand years or so,

And she was magic, a shaman,

And in a generation or two, a spirit.

When other people died, as they did,

The community decided to lay them down

Next to the corpse of the deity

Newly covered with petals and leaves.

For as long as anyone could remember,

And we have already forgot, they came

To sit above the grave, chew their meat,

And lay the bones carefully around the spot.

She has become data and jargon, line drawings

At best speculation on the origins of thought

Or  art, measurements and weights.

Now she is a longing, dream and hope.