Archeology, by Larry Kilman

8/29/2025

Manhole cover, Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, Japan. OKJaguar, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Archeology

When dust covers everything and the excavators finally come
as they did in Pompeii, they will find curiosities, whomever they may be.
There are mysteries and patterns that will need explaining.

This is how myths and legends are formed.
The most utilitarian objects will assume the power of magic.

In the middle of the line-straight streets, like buttons down a shirt,
they will discover a symbol of ancient municipal pride,
coins of the realm, regular and round and unusually heavy.
These ancient circles, half a meter across, are covered in designs:
Deer and roses, or shooting stars and skylines,
leaves and trees and even temples over the dark below.
Some will appear as hieroglyphs or have pleasing geometic patterns:
Waffles, basket weaves and circles, tactile and familiar, cast in iron and concrete.

How will these beautiful creations be deciphered?
Covering the underworld of storm drains, steam tunnels,
bundles of electric and fiber optic cables,
more ornate that can be expected or explained
for mere covers to access points in the pavement?

And you likely won’t be able to explain them either,
these decorations that pass underfoot,
a slight disturbance for wheels of cars and bicycles,
never occuring to us these objects offer clues to who we are,
our compelling desire to decorate even small slabs of metal.
We never spare a thought for the artists of the industrial age,
wearing blue overalls and sweating, arms covered with burns,
sketching pictures with a stumpy pencil on a small scrap of paper
to be cast into eternity.

What if I told you they were made by hand
by a giant deep in the woods, on a blazing forge,
each one as unique as a snowflake.
Bet you would look at them then.

Larry Kilman

Larry Kilman is a graduate of Syracuse University with a dual major in art history and magazine writing. He is a journalist and poet who has been lucky enough to live and work on four continents. His poems have been published or will be published in a wide variety of journals, including Epiphany, Mudfish 4, Brief Wilderness and 7th-Circle Pyrite. He lives in South Africa.