there is a tendency with history, i think, because we're so far removed from it, to kind of forget that all of the people were people
a child 10,000 years ago left a handprint on a wall. they were fingerpainting. a viking climbs up a rock just to carve the words "this is very high" 10ft off the ground. somebody centuries... milennia... ago burned their dinner so thoroughly that they buried the ruined pot in the backyard rather than attempt to clean it. shakespeare got drunk and wrote dick jokes. tutankhamun was a little boy who liked ducks more than anything. a roman carves his name into a monument in another country saying "i was here". a prisoner, centuries ago, in the tower of london scratches lines into the wall as a tally marking the days. a medieval monk scrawls in the margins bemoaning the boredom of his work.
every human being across history has said "i was here. i lived. i loved. i made something. i laughed. i cried. please do not forget me"
most of us are not important enough that we will be remembered by name for more than a few decades. we are not kings or queens or great military leaders or innovators or influential artists, musicians, authors.
but all of us, every one, has a deep primal need to persist. we leave handprints on the wall, scratch our names into stones, carve initials into a tree, mark our growth as children on a wall, bury little time capsules. write in the margins of a book. hide notes behind the wallpaper.
reaching out into the future to some unknown human long after we're gone to say
"hello, you. i was here, once"
here i re-wrote it as a poem to fit your tag
Somewhere far away from me And impossibly long ago, now A mother holds her child up high To leave a handprint on the wall
A man I will never meet Climbs a rock for fun He writes a message on the stone And he says “this is very high”
Somebody, once Cooked a meal and burned it Took the pot to the land outside their house And buried the evidence
An Egyptian king Thousands of years before my birth Wore a shirt embroidered with little ducks And kept it, lovingly, in a chest
In a prison cell within a tower A man stretches out through centuries And marks off the days of his sentence As lines on the wall
A long-forgotten monk Labours over a manuscript by candlelight And writes in the margins He is bored, and he has a hangover
They leave pieces of themselves behind And they say
“I was here I was here please do not forget me I was alive and I loved and I got sick I had a favourite animal I was here. Do you love me? I love you”
Yes, I do. I hold your life between my hands And I see it, and I love you
I scratch my name into a rock On a tree, I carve my initials And the initials of someone I love So very much
I bury a box in my garden And I write in the margins I reach into the future To somebody I do not know
A stranger who will never know me
“Hello, you” I say “I was here, once. I loved and I got sick and I had a favourite colour
Do not forget about me, please I love you”
