Did you know that, well within our years,
They found the hidden galleries of Chauvet:
A cavern, love, that stone-fall sealed abruptly
Twenty-seven thousand years ago;
Immuring so its ancient mural wonders?
‘Chauvet Cave’ are words to conjure with,
Or are once one has come to contemplate
The artistry with which some Ice Age hunters,
Just five millennia before the fateful fall,
Depicted the great creatures of their time.
The subtlety and deftness of their art,
Recaptured from so many years ago,
Must prompt the realization on our part
That these painters, seen in time’s long flow,
Were kin and not remote in kind of mind.
That they could apprehend and then depict
The moving forms of hulking Ice Age bears,
The animated shapes of fighting rhinos,
The eyes and mouths of horses, lions’ heads,
Makes for startled, time-lapse recognition.
Imprinted on the Aurignacian floor,
At Chauvet Cave, were found the stunning trace
Of one boy’s footprints, partnered by a hound,
Who passed that way, a flickering torch in hand,
With wonder etched on his illiterate face.
Imagine, now, you are that vanished child;
My book of verse the opened Chauvet Cave:
What is your torch but wit, or what your wild
Imaginings, at all I here engrave -
And what will be the footprints that YOU leave?