So shrieks the machine:
“Treasure! Treasure’s here, just below!”
A spade plunges into turf
Cutting root and blade
With impunity
Casting both aside into a heap
Of earth and rock, displaced
A portal grows
A hole in space and time
Back, back
To soil and stone
To woody tendrils
Damp with life
Dry as death, both
Intertwined
Telling a tale
Of what lies beneath
Now, and before
Unseen in the thickest darkness
No light (no space for it)
No air (no room to breathe)
The sharpness of an edge glints
Fingers snap back
The search, halted:
A thing! A thing!
We found a thing!
Cautious, cautious
For the safety of our self
(And, of course, the thing:
Neither do we wish broken)
A tooth, loose
Wiggling
In the landscape’s fleshy mouth
Until with a pop
A shower of dirt
The fragment’s free
Drawn up into the sunlight
A shard of glass
Reflects the sky once more
How odd
A solitary piece
So out of place
But as the shovel probes and pries
Another beckons, and another
The process repeats
Gently, we pluck artifacts
From a cozy bed
Where undisturbed
They have reclined
How long?
Longer than a day, a week
Years, decades?
Centuries?
Unlikely, that last one
(A cursory review suggests)
The fragments form a puzzle
Fitting, here and there
Forming the shape of a narrow-necked bottle
Rounded lip smeared with rust
The remnants of a cap, less sturdy in resistance
To the thick, moist blanket
Of earth’s embrace
Back to dust
Just enough metal left
To pique the machine’s curiosity
The what and the why:
We have one and not the other
A singular glass bottle
Broken and buried
In the middle of the yard
No note, nor traces thereof
(No pirate treasure here)
Too small for liquor
(No pirate rum in a hollow root)
No other rubbish present
(No pit for pirates’ trash)
How odd, this tiny clue
Glimpsed through the looking glass
Of a small round hole
To a small round past
Why this? Why there?
Answers are elusive
Equal parts mysterious and mundane
An invitation to conjecture:
A castoff vessel
Of no particular importance
Interred into the earth
By accident or bland design
Is that all?
Is there more?
(We search for meaning
Where perhaps there is none)
Cast into the earth and hidden
(Like so many others, lost
Until the end of time)
Still, of all, these shards are special:
They were found
