Unearthed

Unearthed*

Bury it again.
Not nearly enough time underground:
you can still see the forest in the file -
make out a trunk, a root,
the pattern on a wing,
a vagrant allele,
a sylvan word
(silvery like a stolen Torah bell)…

Who’s served by this premature excavation?
No, bury it again.
Subcontract the job to
the microbes, the heat, the think tanks.
They know how to purify and petrify
an archive, put it to work.
They’ll turn out fuel, steaks, artifacts, samples, metals, myths –
cheap and fit for human consumption.

* The poem was inspired by this story about the Figueiredo report in Brazil.