Keeping Time

I could spend the whole night

getting back to my stone-chipping roots
hand and skin where flint and obsidian
once hid.

The slap is sharp

but makes nothing,
slices nothing, and I sweat but for
quivering air, and no animal falls lifeless to feed
the beloved community.

Quivering air and a tapping foot,

a song to lift the melancholy
and time to keep it all in place. The children grow, they turn away
and back and have children of their own and get old and die.

Our flint-knapping marks the rhythm of their passing,

we leave only flakes and arrowheads to mark our time
and quivering air in a rhythm that always is,
even when we have ceased from playing it.