Lascaux ll, by Neil Creighton

Photo of cave paintings at Lascaux, Photographer unknown. Public domain.

Lascaux II.

Few galleries are more beautiful.
There is a hush,
a sense of the sacred.
In the dim light the walls shimmer, 
covered with confident boldness of line,
beauty of eye, antler, hoof and horn,
curves and bumps and ceiling too
masterfully integrated into one fluid flow.

17,000 years ago,
in the nearby cave of Lascaux,
men and women mixed their colours,
prepared smoke free oil,
built their scaffolding and,
like Michelangelo,
covered the walls or lay on their backs
and painted the roof,
moved by their muse,
a deeply human compulsion
to not just represent
the power of hoof and curve of horn,
but to create beauty,
to seek meaning,
and to reflect the sacred,
a sense of something vast beyond themselves
of which they
were a small, vulnerable but gifted part.

I know you, my brothers, my sisters,
painting in your cave.
Your sensibility is mine.
This human finger, touching the keyboard,
shaping words into patterns,
seeking order and meaning,
surely comes from shared desire.
Is it really so different
that your vision was herds, horns and hooves
and the mark of your hands on the wall,
whilst mine is songs of the heart, 
longing for compassion and surrender to love,
when we, in vulnerable mortality
and common humanity
desire the beauty of art 
and communion beyond self
with the mysterious divine.

Neil Creighton

This poem was first published in The Literary Yard.
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Neil Creighton is an Australian poet with a passion for social justice and a love of the natural world. Recent publications include "Poetry Quarterly", "Silver Birch Press", "Praxis Online", "South Florida Poetry Journal" and "Verse-Virtual", where he is a contributing editor. His poetry blog iswindofflowers.blogspot.com.au