Weight

A family trip across the whole of the United States
when I was six years old
at one point in our journey brought us to an ancient pueblo,
once subterranean but now open to the sky.

It no longer had a name,
nor a living people to dwell within,
its ancestral walls were broken, sunlight streaming through,
yet it inspired the anthropologist I would one day be.

I approached it cautiously with my mother,
carefully traversing the rock strewn terrain
as best my small limbs could manage
until we found the entrance.

We stepped inside, and my childish chatter was stilled,
a respectful hush maintained merely by its gravity,
though my young mind could not yet consciously comprehend
its meaning, I felt the weight of centuries of humanity in this small space.

Voices of the past seemed to keen on the wind
that piled desert grit up its sides ever more with each passing year,
and the combined souls of thousands spoke to my own,
an awareness I carry in memory to this day.