The Forbidden Insight

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

The animals inside the Lascaux cave

Are almost more alive than on the veldt

For tourists on safari.  In a nave

Of holiness where stone has long-time knelt

The saints and knights have ever been as pure

As painting on these walls now found

Past eons of the long-lost humans.  Tour

These caves and wide savannahs but around

Us we will never see those shamans or

Their artists.  We can never see their eyes

Or brushing hands.  We hope that in each core

Was something that the gods would exorcise.

  Those painters saw with fingers what we all

     Would see—unless their vision would appall.

~ Phillip Whidden