Valley of the Caves
Nahal ha-Me’arot, Mt. Carmel: Unesco World Heritage site.
Difficult to see now, on these gravel trails
climbing uphill to caves inhabited
for half a million years, so signs explain,
hard to imagine, peering at remains
of what was once a home, how life was then
ages before us, when this life was real
when every new-found cave might be the lair
of mountain lion, bear; ears tuned by fear
let us like them listen for growl or bark
of wolf, hyaena, leopard, let us hear
the stories told around the fire, sharp
sparks like fireflies on the evening air
the women scraping skins and sewing furs
gathering cacti, berries, carobs, herbs,
firewood, water; each at her end to lie
buried outside the cave, her mountain home
become an open-air museum for those
who now wander these paths, ponder these bones.
We here return through ages to our source.
Difficult to feel now, but their caves and graves,
our skyscrapers and cemeteries,
their hand-axes, our mobile phones,
their arrowheads, our military drones
show that we differ merely by degree:
through aeons we have not changed, unless for worse,
we like them mere points on Earth’s long line
of bones and artifacts explained by signs,
dust for a future archaeology
we like them becoming prehistory...
Difficult for us to imagine, now.
Judy Koren, from Haifa, Israel, retired a few years ago from a career as a freelance information analyst and returned to poetry, her first love. Her poems have appeared in Israeli and international literary magazines, among them Better Than Starbucks; Blue Unicorn; Lighten Up Online (UK), The Orchards Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken, Mediterranean Poetry and The Lyric. She recently finished a 4-year tenure as President of Voices Israel, a society for poets writing in English.
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