Some of the best poems you'll read - Perigee

"Language Arts"
by Jeffrey Alfier
With ten-thousand years of overlapped lives,
Neanderthals and more Modern humans
thrived across savannas from each other.
Most Neanderthal bones found are children—
nearly fifty-percent, they say. In one,
they found that bone in the back of the throat
that enables speech to progress farther
than the grunts we thought accompanied them
slouching down their road to oblivion,
non-enlightenment tripping on their tongues,
hunting paths and wombs leading to dead ends.
We don t know if our divergent forebears
ever merged, how they beheld each other.
We think of Cro-Magnon mothers warning
their daughters away from the broad-set eyes
that leered past liminal borders, lit red
by that brilliant accident we named fire.
We think of words stuck in throats like a drought.
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