When we speak of them,we have to say
perhaps, or probably, or almost certainly.
But almost, almost certainly
they understood what we have called
acoustics. Painted their vibrant stags
and bison where the sound was good.
And the drums would beat, and the pulse
of the mountain would respond.
The hollow bones would bell and whinny
and the watchful stag and horse
would say they understood.
We try to read a wisdom
never meant for us: unearth
their shards, and dust them off,
and guess; decode and annotate
their wordless images, read them
as metaphor. We hear
but cannot share
the truth they told to one another
against the freezing wind, the days when hunters
returned empty-handed, malevolence unseen
beyond the campfire circle: we speak
to the living Earth. It answers us.