QUIETUDE [sonnet two]

Not like there was silence anyway I heard my Mother’s compassionate voice insisting that the only option was listening to an aged wisdom her coaching about being nearly seventy.

Not like there wern’t other voices in the recesses, my own too I heard my Father’s voice speaking over a flight line’s roar of air power, taking off and landing on talking about the courage to face what may come despite what may have occurred. Memories bespoke the bravery having followed a plan of determination of design of a full life contributing and following the course, still, all the while, aging.

Homo naledi is an extinct hominin species discovered in 2013 in the Rising Star Cave system, Gauteng province, South Africa

Twenty feet into the cave hearing a very soft rustling then louder, and a flight of bats making us duck down as they made their way out.

Crouched down, shielding eyes from the flying bats, thousands of them it seemed our arms over heads, all no one got up until they’d passed.

Blink your eyes now, keeping them closed think of yesterday or perhaps the day before then think back even further past your imaginable past of a short life measured in tens of decades to the in-human, maybe the un-human, yet of our genus, a sort-of our species, with all of our humanly traits in our human family tree we speak sometimes in whispers about all our abilities in this modern age shaking heads over the evolutions of thinking towards Being Human.

There is a dawn’s rise into the cradle of thought an emotional discovery in fingertips touching the body that belonged to those we loved after this, what was, has gone cold warmth of corporeal, depth of emotions has gone to an undiscovered afterlife.

We bury our loved ones in so many varied mortuary rituals honoring the dead, giving grief a presence for those left behind thinking, surprised when there is a discovery that a quarter million years ago a far distant hominoid relative, Homo Naledi did the same thing then, that we do today.

Underneath the arrogance of our ways to believe we moderns are the only Humans to love and cherish those that have come before.