Aside from the small bird that leaped from the dry chaparral it is quiet here.
Then faint voices that appear to be a Cro-Magnon, or a Neanderthal dialect
reach me: from this distance, I cannot tell the difference. In the next epoch

a cockerel announces a rotting field of broken limbs. As "The place where
they lay, it has / a name—it has none." Where there are no names
the decomposing bodies of myths guard all the paths leaving the
Anthropocene, wrestling their shadows back down, into the past.

 

 

 

-

The place: P. Celan. From, "The Straitening>" M. Hamburger, trans.