Where was he heading, the herdsman from Tyrol?
The first tourist, dressed in a deerskin shirt
and a cape of braided grass.
Yet he carried articles of quality:
A yew-wood bow and arrows of shaped flint
fitted with feathers. A European embalmed
by the frost with his axe and dagger, when he lost
his way in a snowstorm back in the Stone Age.
There he crouched when the Celts of Stonehenge
dragged monoliths across the breadth of England
and raised an observatory to watch the stars.
Caesar's elephants must have passed his cave
on their way north—the alarm of war. He missed that.
Sat sheltered with his ears stuffed with snow
thinking his thoughts in the enormous silence.
Found. They hacked him free of the ice block,
strapped him tight to a helicopter
and flew him down to Innsbruck to meet
the Press. That's when he died.
* Note: The Iceman, Homo Tirolensis, was discovered in the Austrian glacier Similaum (1991), where he lay preserved in ice for 5300 years—the oldest human being ever found.
* Translated by Heather Spears
322 Review publishes provocative emerging and established artists. Conceived and operated by former Rowan University graduate students of the Master of Arts in Writing Program, 322 Review is aggressively seeking the best fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and mixed media works of visual art.
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