Reaching
Terry Jude Miller
In artificial light, a claw-like motif is found
on the Island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.
Its fingers turn back the clock of man’s first art
to 68,000 years ago,
232,000 solar rotations
as Homo sapiens before the painter filled
his mouth with ochre, spread his fingers
upon stone, and spat history upon his hand,
halo of red, giving meaning to something
beyond the reach of explanation, an inflection
only the heart can find, struggles to perfect
itself through language, religion, science,
and stories recorded in a new medium,
by torched vision, innate to man, but as puzzling
as the stars above Indonesia, that never see
this creature’s masterpiece, yet the artist emerges
from the place beneath ground, awed
and mesmerized by their dance of light.
This poem was inspired by a BBC article on the world's oldest cave art. The poem investigates how art is the springboard to language, religion, and science. Every poem I write owes itself in some way to these first artists who possessed a thought and made art from it.
TERRY JUDE MILLER works in academia in Houston, Texas. His poems have received multiple Pushcart nominations and have been published in Sontag Mag, Feed the Holy, Encore, Equinox, Trigger Warning Magazine, Exomorphosis, Ars Sententia, The Nature of Things, The Bayou Review, Boundless, the Poetry At Round Top Anthology, and forthcoming in Rattle. Miller is the former 1st Vice Chancellor of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. terryjudemiller.com