You’ve always loved them.
Bison, bears, and horses, too,
mammoths sketched
on the walls of caves,
the ancients’ outstretched
hands, all those palmprints
in rusty, old-blood reds
reaching for the life after,
children yet to come.

Remember the arrowheads
we found after rains
in our first garden,
that Stone Age knife
I unearthed, those coins
someone buried
in our front flower bed,
the newest from 1884?

What will they know of us?

The daffodils you planted?
The mossy stone I laid
on our old Lab’s grave?

Will they stop to say, Listen!
Somewhere a dead man
sighs. A woman whispers,
We were here. We were here.