The Braided Stream

It’s easy to forget, when the news shows two smiling children,

that you’re looking at the dead. An actress is found buried

A continent away, their killer drinks beer in the sun.

On that same continent, cradle of humanity, a cave

deep in the earth is found filled with skeletons, proof

our ancestors learned to bury their dead. They had no words,

no way of saying mother, lover, son, but they carried

their loved bodies through a dark lit by torches. They knew

the living and the dead could not stay long together.

They knew they could not leave their dead

beneath the open sky. The bodies

found deep inside the earth aren’t human, not yet.

They have shoulders and hands built for climbing,

lower limbs for walking. They touch the earth

and it transforms them. And here, inside the earth:

mandible, ribs, bones of inner ear, the vertebrae

of infants thin as thimbles.

And here the fossil record falls apart. In London

tiny bodies turn to earth. In tabloids they wear jackets,

the fleece hoods framing smiling faces. Their mother

had left television to become a teacher. She couldn’t

keep her children safe. The coroner says he broke their necks. And then

he buried them. For tenderness, to give their bodies

a safe and quiet home? Or just

to smooth his flight? When he’s found hiding

he tries to ward off capture with a knife and spoon. He won’t smile

for the cameras but he won’t say he’s sorry either. Before we were human

we knew to carry the dead away from the living

and place their bodies deep inside a cave named for stars.