Surfaces

Surfaces

Surfaces everywhere abound.

Prominent are those lived around.

For ancient man, it was air
where it lay upon the ground
and stretched to sleep upon the sea.

Yet to stir in either realm;
to the sailors hand upon the helm;
to the hunter caught far of home;
on land condensed its awesome
power to a tornado fury.

Where at sea, its potent
gathering whips up a howl
that speaks for the tons
of water whose final growing
will bash some distant shore.

And where the land lives in
continual erosion of arranged borders
with the sea, a surface he knew well.
This Ancient man, he traveled
best upon the ground, not in it,
rarely above it, and where his body
touched would come to be called his feet.

Without the navigator’s up around,
this earth his feet they touched,
could well be upside down.

Though most his body was touched by air
he chooses at lengths of capital advance
to find it suitable covering….
what we now call clothes.

How would you feel
wearing something you just ate?

Later would come the smell
and later yet through proper age and care
would come to be a grand old suit.

Good enough to decorate
with shells, feathers and such as that.

My how the times have changed.

We know well and call it history
of what he has become.

But what was it like then,
especially of his mind?

John Mullinax (date unknown)