Human Evolution

Comes Cro-Magnon, tall, young, invincible,

Hunter-warrior, rich priest of flints,

The sun’s disciple, born to summer plains,

Falling in anger upon the runts,

The ugly Neanderthals, beasts of night,

Blood-drinking lunatics, who, offering submission,

Present their hairy behinds.

Ochre-ruddled corpses gestate in the earthwomb,

Bone-notches mark the teething moon’s indenture.


Red Ochre Men stalk across Australia,

Inquisitors hunting down the blasphemer,

The traitor to ceremony and myth.


Cretan dancers romp in the sevenfold maze’s spiral:

Seven maidens and seven youths

Offer their throats to the strangler’s cord.

The horned altar waxes with the moon.


Spiral Castle, the revolving isle,

-Grave of the expired king,

Fallen sun’s haven,-

Glints in the mind when cranes are in flight.

The penitent, offering prayers as he steps,

Negotiates the maze inlaid on a church floor.


The spider moon shuttles with threads of intent.

Shaman’s garter-cord, sutra and cincture

All fasten in bondage to the crux quadrata.


Three strands twist the umbilical,

The baby a spider suspended by a filament.

Leftward the moon blooms and perishes.


A centrifugal spider throws out radial threads,

Enunciating a sinistral spiral,

And turns back at the outer edge,

Back towards the centre,

Coming home to symmetry.

His octagonal sanctum awaits a sacrifice.

The moon turns white, then red, then black;

First, a virgin, sealed in immaculate reveries,

Then a blushing flirt deflowered, making monthly blood-libation,

Bringing forth the red-blessed babe,

And, lastly, the venerable dame entombed,

Pending a glorified body.


Thirteen moons stir the cauldron of space,

Brewing fire and rain.

See what burns in the water’s eye:

Tiny salt-stars from the sea.


Left-handed shadows walk backwards forever,

Upside-down in the trancetime of the dead.


Midsummer. The spent king, mead-sodden,

Enters the megalithic circle of thirteen.

Lashed to the cross-oak, flayed, blinded, gelded,

Hacked into joints, he roasts over fires,

And twelve celebrants dance the figure-of-eight,

Tearing his flesh with their teeth.

An alderwood boat floats downriver to the island,

Bearing the genitals and the oracular head.