Manifesto Pt. 7
It was maybe 20 years ago
A man was found in a cave in England
He’d been there 9 thousand years
But had been preserved by cool dark dryness
Enough to leave some DNA in a molar
A history teacher from a little town
Maybe 11 miles away
Thought it might be fun
To see if anyone nearby
might be related to this man
from 300 generations back
He got Oxford to test 20 people
Whose families he knew had been
Around for “awhile”
There was one match – It was him
But he was 43, an only child and never married
Retrospectively, a tragic story
of the death of a long, long line
9043 futile years of suffering
for nothing
5 thoughts on "Manifesto Pt. 7"
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Nice balance between image and abstraction. I love a surprise ending. Nice work Jim.
steve: 1) he’s only 43, still plenty of time for a man to procreate 2) if a match was found in a sample of only twenty this prehistoric cave man probably has thousands of offspring.
…just saying. I wonder about this recent trend of having a DNA “reading” for fun – like using a ouija board. Strange Times
Just 20 years ago, DNA testing was very time consuming and expensive. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell were so wrong, we pay to give up ourselves.
We are so strongly connected to each other, even thousands of years back.
Such an excellent snapshot of this.
K. Bruce Florence
Ditto Bruce above.