Big Bone Lick: The Poem
In the few years I have run this blog, I’ve never encountered poetry written about Big Bone Lick. So imagine my surprise when I discovered this gem of a poem by Robert Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University.
Big Bone Lick
At Big Bone Lick the first explorers
found skeletons of elephants they said,
found ribs of wooly mammoths, tusks.
They dug out teeth the size of bricks
and skulls of giant bison, beavers.
In salty mud licked bare by elk
and deer and buffalo and bears
for ten millennia, the bones
seemed wreckage from a mighty dream,
a graveyard from a golden age,
or killing ground of titans. Here
they saw the ruins of a world
survived by its diminutives,
where Eden once gave way and shrank
to just a regular promised land
to fit our deadly, human scale.
Poem reprinted here with permission by the author. Poem was first published in August 2011 by Southern Cultures journal (Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011 edition).
Check out more poems on Mr. Morgan’s website.
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