Pick Your Teeth

Bits of scrolls, a name of God,
Those are one kind of old thing.

Three times as old, the child’s bones
Curled up in the cave’s sere womb.

Twice as old as the child’s bones,
A great weave of reeds, to hold

Who knows what back then, the stores
Of grain of the first to farm?

Mixed in, mixed dates, points of knives,
Spears, coins from a short-lived mint.

What is short-lived to that cave?
What is not? Lives hid to live

And died. Lives brought their loved dead
Whose bones lived on. Just the gaps

In years, years and years the cave
Kept more or less the same gap

In more or less the same cliffs,
Ate more lives than from the word

Of God when it was still wet
To now. Such a large, dark mouth.