From a Relic

If we had been an ancient thing,
I expect we could have looked back,
been beautiful in our retrospective way of thinking.
Antiquated, made into sepia.
Appreciated from a long way off,
something so uncomplicated,
a place to be yearned for,
when you learn to miss what you never had.
Good old days.
Our age would have been struck in bronze,
hammered out in the way we knew.
A love letter to anthropology.
"We were here, and we were just like you."

If we had been an ancient thing,
a grainy image burned on paper
by light that has long since died,
pressed like leaves between the pages of a book,
we would be relics, permanent.
Gracing the walls of our generation,
first laid into soft graves,
now made hard by the treads of the younger.
Good old days.
Our faces would have made people look twice,
a postcard to our greatest grandchildren.
"We were here, and we were just like you."

If we had been an ancient thing,
I know we would be so curious
of the child and their childhood,
the first steps into the world, kicked over
by the inevitability of ageing.
Appreciated from a long way off,
something so uncomplicated,
a place untouched by knowing.
Good old days.
When we knew the world worked one way,
but never the other.
Our games and rhymes are told by you now.
"We were here, and we were just like you."

If we had been some ancient thing,
I think we would have thought longer,
much longer about how it would all fall away.
Antiquated, made into sepia.
Our statues tarnished by the filth we could not know,
our buildings broken by wars we did not see.
We became a place to be yearned for,
a gentle past without these complications.
Good old days.
Leaving our world, our spaces,
and falling into our own plots of earth,
then falling further,
into the real innocence, the place of no connection,
leaving to you, only our remains,
to do with what you will;
our present lives
to become your impermanent past.
"We were here, and we were just like you."