Palimpsest

Living on a surface
scraped clean by time,
the geology of generations,
the faint striations of what was
once perfected and worn away
to nuance and supposition;
not one scratch, a truth,
an approximation
of the silence
of a ghost.

On our manuscripts,
the crabbed hand-writing
in which our epitaphs were gouged,
bone-fragments, stone-chipped debris,
the obverse of remembrance
in charnel-dust at our feet,
the dust of our amnesia,
amniotic precipitate,
what was to birth:
its death.

What
was written
has been rubbed out,
each woeful tale a substitute
for the last, overtaken by years;
the mystery in the telling remains
even in the effort of our seeing,
as we read these messages
overlaid one upon another,
every one different
and the same;

each one
dead and buried
by the next.

© BH, 2019

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It was Name of the Rose what did it. Long before the long-form TV dramatisation, about the time I first read the book and saw the Sean Connery film, I’d heard the term ‘palimpsest’.  Something written or created on the erased remnant of what was there before.

I liked the idea. Everything we do is a superimposition on previous lives, previous landscapes, previous geology.

This, then is what I made it add up to…