The Cave Painters

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Holding only a handful of rushlight
they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch 
until the great rock chamber
flowered around them and they stood
in an enormous womb of
flickering light and darklight, a place
to make a start. Raised hands cast flapping shadows 
over the sleeker shapes of radiance.

They've left the world of weather and panic
behind them and gone on in, drawing the dark 
in their wake, pushing as one pulse
to the core of stone. The pigments mixed in big shells 
are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries
and the binding juices oozed
out of chosen barks. The beasts

begin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts 
(soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white) 
stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours 
mould those forms from chance, coaxing
rigid dips and folds and bulges
to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches, 
a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes
curling to a crazy gallop.

Intent and human, they attach
the mineral, vegetable, animal
realms to themselves, inscribing
the one unbroken line
everything depends on, from that
impenetrable centre
to the outer intangibles of light and air, even 
the speed of the horse, the bison's fear, the arc
of gentleness that this big-bellied cow 
arches over its spindling calf, or the lancing 
dance of death that
bristles out of the buck's
struck flank. On this one line they leave 
a beak-headed human figure of sticks 
and one small, chalky, human hand.

We'll never know if they worked in silence 
like people praying—the way our monks 
illuminated their own dark ages 
in cross-hatched rocky cloisters, 
where they contrived a binding 
labyrinth of lit affinities
to spell out in nature's lace and fable 
their mindful, blinding sixth sense
of a god of shadows—or whether (like birds 
tracing their great bloodlines over the globe) 
they kept a constant gossip up
of praise, encouragement, complaint.

It doesn't matter: we know
they went with guttering rushlight
into the dark; came to terms
with the given world; must have had
—as their hands moved steadily
by spiderlight—one desire
we'd recognise: they would—before going on 
beyond this border zone, this nowhere 
that is now here—leave something
upright and bright behind them in the dark.

© Eamon Grennan