Lascaux II

It is a facsimile
but few galleries are more beautiful.
There is a hush,
a sense of the sacred.
In the dim light the walls shimmer
with copies of artwork,
walls and ceilings covered
with confident boldness of line,
beauty of eye, antler, hoof and horn,
curves and bumps and ceiling too
masterfully integrated into one fluid flow.

17,000 years ago,
in the nearby cave of Lascaux,
men and women mixed their colours,
prepared smoke free oil,
built their scaffolding and,
like Michelangelo,
covered the walls or lay on their backs,
painting the roof,
moved by their muse,
a deeply human compulsion
to not just represent
the power of hoof and curve of horn
but to create beauty,
to seek meaning
and surely to reflect the sacred,
a sense of something vast beyond themselves
of which they were a small, vulnerable
but gifted part.

I know you, my brothers and sisters.
Your sensibility is mine.
This human finger, touching the keyboard,
shaping words into patterns,
seeking order and meaning,
surely comes from shared desire.
Is it really so different
that your vision was herds, horns and hooves
and the mark of your hands upon the wall,
whilst mine is songs of the heart,
longing for compassion and surrender to love,
when we, in vulnerable mortality
and common humanity,
across this vast desert of time
desire the beauty of art
and seek communion beyond self
with the mysterious divine.