A Hike and a Lecture by Michael Ceraolo

from Euclid Creek Book Four

A Hike and a Lecture

A Monday evening in late June,

temperature in the mid-70s

(a few degrees below average)

I make the short walk 

from my house to the park

The hike is led,

                       and the lecture given,

by a retired archaeologist from the area

He,

      along with the sponsoring Metroparks,

provided some pre-hike refreshments

There were some on the hike who,

despite having reached adulthood,

had not learned how to dress themselves,

wearing sandals and even flip-flops

for the trek over

                 exposed tree roots

                 moss-covered rocks

                 decaying leaves

                 up and down hills,

                                            slong

with broken glass left by those

who love to foul beautiful things

                                                (I'll bet

there was a substantial overlap between those so dressed

and those who just showed up for the event

without doing the required pre-registration,

but that can't be confirmed)

                                           Luckily,

no one sustained any injuries

For me,

the highlight of the hike

was sitting in a rock shelter,

                                          which

we were told was of Berea sandstone

and had been occupied periodically

over the last 10,000 years

(It has been occupied quite recently,

at least temporarily,

                             and

the occupants had left graffiti

and even more broken glass)

Talk of petroglyphs in the area,

                                             and

possibly having been here but now erased,

led to a question of whether

the graffiti would still be here

in two thousand years,

                                  and

after some technical explanations

of how the weather affected

writings left outside on rock,

the archaeologist,

                          with a laugh,

admitted he didn't really know,

an admission that only increased

his credibility in my eyes

I imagined,

                 not the recent miscreants,

                                                        but

those who had lived in the shelter

in the distant past

It offered some protection

against the weather,

                              but

it was not water-tight:

                                  we could see

where water dripping on the rock wall

had caused the iron in the rock to rust

And the wind wouldn't always be

blowing over the top of the shelter

No tool or weapon fragments were seen;

they were either buried out of sight,

worn away by millennia of weather,

scavenged by souvenir hunters,

                                                or

taken away by their makers when those makers

moved to another location

Even on a summer night

it would get cool after sunset;

sitting,

           exposed or semi-exposed,

around a fire in the depths of winter

waiting for a mammoth or mastodon

to happen by,

                    they had the usual ways

of our race (the human) to amuse themselves:

sports and games

music and dance

storytelling

(Ten thousand years later,

                                       we still

have only the same amusements,

                                                  although

the technology of both delivering

and experiencing them

is constantly changing)

I think of those lost stories and songs,

                                                         and

wonder if,

                despite the increasing

sophistication of said technology,

our stories and songs will still

be here in ten thousand years,

                                             and

like the archaeologist I can't come up with

a satisfactory answer,

                                  though

I'll continue to write as if they will

Bio:  "Michael Ceraolo is a retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had one full-length book (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press) and a few chapbooks published (among the chapbooks is Cleveland Haiku, from Green Panda Press). He has a second full-length book, Euclid Creek Book Two, forthcoming from unbound content press, and is continually working on new and existing poetry projects.

For more linformation and ordering instructions CLICK HERE