28 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Turkey
In the beginning there was circularity,
The sun, the moon
The eyes of early wanderers
Who sought the comforting circles
of the openings of caves.
And in the arched and silent interiors
They painted their demons
And charging aurochs
Their shamans and broken spears
In the pulsating near-light
Of pitch-dipped torches.
The eternal hunt of yesterdays
And tomorrows
Reflected in the raging
rounded flanks
Of the sacred bull.
ARW
1992
28 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Turkey
Tags
Anatolia, Archaeology, Caravanserai, Diyarbakir, Hills, Tigris, Travel, Turkey, Van
Often, but always with great wonder
I have observed from the window of our
dusty van
A string of abandoned and buried caravanserai
Strung like prayer beads
Across the broad and thirsty plains of
Anatolia –
Disguised by time and nearly indistinguishable
From the ancient rounded hills
Through which throngs have marched and traded,
fought and loved,
And which history has never recorded.
ARW
1992
28 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Turkey
Tags
Archaeology, Burial, Cayonu Tepesi, Ergani, Poetry, Silence, Site, Travel, Turkey
To describe the natally-flexed remains
of someone struck dumb ten millennia ago
as “Burial AD 6-08”
is to assume that echoes are silenced
with discovery.
Or is there a commonality of human-ness
that crosses the dreadful gap
and threads the journey
of terrible silence
with tentative murmurs
that somehow commingle
our mutual pasts.
ARW
1985
28 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Turkey
Looking through the microscope
at ancient cells of blood
resurrected briefly –
shooting across my line of vision
like crystalline stars
in the black void of the enigmatic past.
Constellations of antiquity
tantalizing the present watcher
who looks for tentative soundings
from the abyss of time
but is answered only with
sanguine silence.
Who were you and what were
the thoughts that came with the
final ending?
And then, froze in the residues
of ten thousand years ago.
But never mind –
there are no whispers or cries in
this window to the past.
Only the silence of a brief
and finite return.
ARW
1987
28 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Turkey
The rat of worry nibbles with regularity
at the edges of my mind.
Time-out while isolation and hot sun
cause a temporary mending
Feet sinking into ancient fields
kicking and nudging the lithic past
with dusty toes in awkwardly furrowed rows.
Everything in the proper perspective.
Life figured in millennia makes the present
frail and momentary.
No fences or highways.
No sounds but the buzzing of insects,
and the eternal whispers of a soft, dry wind.
But everything is on hold.
And the rodent sits quietly
waiting patiently, so patiently
for my imminent return.
ARW
1998
28 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Turkey
Tags
Archaeology, Bos, Cayonu, Christians, Hilar Rocks, Muslims, Ritual, Travel, Turkey
Lingering behind
I watched as the others
Drove back to Expedition house
Over the soft and rolling Anatolian hills
And as I turned toward the darkening sky in the west
There appeared the last of the Kurdish diggers
Winding his way through the surreal and ancient humps
of Hilar rocks.
Village-bound he passed from the ten-millenia site
Past the cave-graves of ancient Christians
With their eternal symbols carved into soft limestone
And where only the bats remained in their rifled resting places.
Just below the mound of Cayonu
Lie the tumbled monuments of long dead Muslims
Where the old and enigmatic relics lay
bared to view;
A continuum of the supernatural.
Then as the sun plunged beneath the rock surround
This dead and most ancient village of Cayonu
With its tumbled walls and polished pink slab,
Its horns of long-extinct Bos and ritual skulls
Took on blood-red hues
And if one listened carefully
There were the undecipherable sounds of the dead.
ARW
1985
28 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Turkey
Tags
Fenceless space
pushing past the horizon
climbing the well-defined hills
that attach themselves to the
less-distant Taurus mountains
where silent space strikes the
molten rock
and echoes back
to emphasize and envelope
the watcher in a vast and soundless
timelessness.
ARW
1991
28 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Turkey
Sounds and smells
Evocative of a past that
did not happen.
Teasing me with half-remembered
sensations
Which never could have been.
And yet the mind and body know the
Answers to riddles.
The melancholy call of the faceless
muezzin
The wash of ship-made swells on the shore below
A mingled tangle of smells:
Spices, dust, exhaust
And the footfalls of ancient dead.
An amalgam of two thousand years
Recalled one night
On a narrow bed in
A venerable red yali
On the banks of the
moon-cast Bosphorus.
ARW
1977
28 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Turkey
I cannot say
Just what it is that starts the journey back
To those Anatolian nights on the ratchety and ancient train
Dreams not summoned but filled with sounds and scents
Even the night light is different
The moon larger
the shadows of hills more defined
Voices from the darkness of the compartment
Comrades from the years of uncovering the past
Scattered, gone on to other places
Other worlds.
ARW
1998
28 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Turkey
How do we decipher with any assurance
The tantalizing debris of the faceless, wordless past
Buried by sand and soil and
the unimaginable span of millenniums.
There are the tumbled stones that take form
with the diggers’ spades
Recreating the phantom village
With its precisely placed houses
Charred hearths cold with age
Tools of stone, bone and obsidian fashioned
by hands and minds
With an uncanny beauty and symmetry
Tiny figures of fashioned clay
Also faceless but profound with infinite meaning
Then three are the centers of ritual
Structures of amazing beauty
With polished altars and human skulls
Placed with purpose in small cubicles
All presided upon by the overpowering and enigmatic
bucranium of the bull.
ARW
1995
Andree Robitaille Wood 