and, more dimly still, the shellfish eaters,
people of the stone axe,
who pitched their noisome camps
on their garbage heaps;
and straggling far behind,
out of primeval murk,
those wandering hunters in search of food
who crossed the land-bridge of the Bering Strait
and sliding over the glacier's edge
paved our first trails with their Mongol bones.
They followed the game that they pursued
into museums of pre-history,
featureless but for the fluted points
dropped from the bloodied mammoth's flanks.
The mounds rise up on every side
of a seven-layered world, as I stand
in the middle of the Ocmulgee fields,
by the Central of Georgia Railway track,
with the Creek braves under my feet
and the City of Macon at my back.
WOMAN
Young,
you stung
like a blackberry bush. Even feet
armed you,
0
savage girl.
You were difficult to take.
Young
Stanley Kunitz
