( The 'Amesbury Archer' in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire museum)
Weren’t you the King of Stonehenge?
If so, why did I drag
This twist of a leg
Over the stony path
From an alpine birth
To an ungrateful resting place?
To the migrating beat
Of a distant drum
Heard on a far horizon
Of a star-field steppe,
Pulling me like a line of hope
To follow seams of copper ore,
Pulling me to this western shore.
Though it was hard
To find words to share
I had hoped the tongue
Of flowing liquid metal
I conjured out of rock
Would speak for itself.
Now look around you, share
the treasures of my grave;
They wanted none of it,
Couldn’t wait to bury
The new out of sight
And turn back once again
To the sovereign circle
Of their old gods of stone.
I came for trade, not war
to open minds not wounds,
An outsider, certainly
But bearer of new opportunity,
With an uncertain spark
And an alloy’s unsteady alchemy.
First of my kind,
I was met by anxious circles of faces
Reddened by a flames flicker,
Expectant, sceptical,
In the end, clinging to the dark.
To the beakers and the cheer
Of their black fermented beer.
In the entrails and intestines
Of their island ways
And the scarlet current streams
Bursting from the berry whorls.
My frosted feet
endured ice streams
Trading along paths
Village by wondering village
To these indifferent shores.
Love abandoned to devotion,
To an uncertain spark
And an alloys unsteady alchemy,
Anxious circles of faces
Reddened by the flame flicker,
Expectant, sceptical.
If you see him,
Say hello to my son for me
Living hereabouts;
I married, tried to settle locally
Lived with the pain, the distress
The hurtful looks
In mocking faces
Burning like the incurable abscess
In the rotting recess of my gum:
I hope he’s found a home and peace
Some rest, in this alien place,
That I thought all for the best
And that the secrets of the smelt
I so lovingly taught
Have proved somehow valuable
at least not brought him trouble:
I hope his life is worth my struggle.
When I lay dying in the dark
Coughing up potions of berry and bark
Given in a kindness of regrets
They pressed me anxiously
Are there more of your kind to come?
Hoping there were none,
And ignorant of how our boats
water tight as the bells of our beakers
Are even now afloat
Seeding us over seas, over rivers.
They’d bury me they said
With respect, in their ways
My bones thrown in
With the mound of their own
To gather together each year
In the seasons great cycle
Seen by the Sun and the moon.
They said they respected death,
I tried to tell them about life
And the return to the heavenly steppe.
Bury me like this, I said
Curled in my last of my life
As curled in my first breath,
Place possessions around me
As you see them here at hand
Free me to flow like the ore
From the belly of the earth
Into the form new life gives me,
On the endless grasslands
Where we know no borders
No circles of enclosing stone.
No, I was never King of Stonehenge.
Notes
The Amesbury Archer lived in the early Bronze Age, around 2300 BCE and at a point just after Stonehenge was completed. DNA analysis has shown two amazing facts. First that the identity of the ethnic group the Archer belonged to can be traced back to the Steppes between Turkey and China. Secondly that this individual was born in Central Europe, probably in the Alps and migrated to Britain. A second grave near this contained a second skeleton, believed to be a relative, possibly his son. The Archer was amongst the very first of the Beaker people to migrate to Britain bringing with them the new technology of copper smelting and fine metalwork in gold. The Beaker people are so named because of their distinctive bell shaped beaker pottery, believed to be drinking vessels. To me, the Archer talks of a Britain always connected to the wider world, not just Europe, a Britain always benefiting from trade with that wider world in technology and ideas and a Britain that has always had the opportunity to develop as a rich, diverse multi-cultural eco-system community, even if there have always been, 'anxious circles of faces / Reddened by a flames flicker, / Expectant, sceptical.'
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