[New-Poetry] Inside the Crocodile

[JforJames at aol.com]

Inside the Crocodile 
 
The deciphered scraps of papyrus 
found wound inside 
the mummified  crocodile,
Sappho, Herodotus, 
Pindar and the Pre-Socratics
saved from  oblivion, 
they say. Because it was all old, 
we believed it was all  gold.
Could there not have been 
a few Attic hacks among
the ancients?  Then again,
we are all writing inside the crocodile, 
and it’s dark in  there.
A stick shoved in at last moment, 
that stylus used to scrawl  urwords in dust, 
stuck there to hold open 
its snaggle-toothed  overbite.
And now that we’ve staked our life on the pen,
it becomes the  gnomon of time, 
a monolith casting no shadow while we live, 
the abyss  beyond carbon black as ink  
But that maw knows more than we do, 
so  we must trust that it will disgorge 
a few fine fragments worth 
our  attention, admiration.



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