The Tell Down cantilevered stairs, wood railings led hand over sliding hand through an exhibit archaeologists designed, each step six lifetimes further through the studied dross of culture—refuse mixed with shard and bone, compacted under flint-like floors of ash. Our passage ended thirty-odd feet down. As through lit windows in an empty well, pale earthenware—pieced whole again—displayed some bronze age potter’s narrative of war among the greening blades, an empty hilt and silver inlaid sword, some funeral coins. Lorded by spears, their doom become a trope, stick ranks of shadow men marched to endure a slaughter—charged, impaled, death’s blackened drapery flung across the fell of corpses-- all their gutted reek to earth in sodden layers at the summoning of flies. Upstairs, outside, flax bloomed. The women who survived enslaved to foreign looms had known these very flowers, blue and persistent as the common soul. Some bone below was mine. I could have marked it, but there was no point, no scope, no story but the lapse of time. William Conelly William Conelly: "I took both Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in English under Edgar Bowers at UC Santa Barbara. Unrelated research and writing work followed, before I returned to academia in 2000. Since then, I've served in both the US and the UK as an associate professor, tutor and seminar leader in English studies. With dual citizenship, I now reside primarily in the West Midlands town of Warwick. In 2015 the Able Muse published an illustrated mix of my verse dating back four decades; it's titled Uncontested Grounds and may be reviewed at their website or via Amazon."
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The Ekphrastic Review
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February 2025
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