Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira

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

“When he reared his head and neighed from his deep chest, like deep wind-bells resounding, she seemed to hear the echoes of another,

darker, more spacious, more dangerous, more splendid world than ours, that was beyond her, and there she wanted to go.”

~ D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr

Clairvoyance inside us tells us they

Were much more really human than ourselves

Bewitched by iPhones.  Horses men heard neigh

Back then were far more real than Santa’s elves.

The shamans were as cloudy as our priests

So there are smoky links between us, yet

Perhaps the shamans doing sex with beasts

Or children were not thought to be the blet

Of evil in that cavern-stretching past.

Perhaps these people cutting out the gut

Of slaughtered deer and bison did not cast

The bowel away as if Only Fans smut.

  These ancients might well hold beasts like us in scorn

    Because we do not cast away our porn.

~ Phillip Whidden