Poetry Corner – Yesterdays
Nothing grounds the truth like good poetry. Here, compliments of the Backfill editors, (and with apologies to the Beatles) is a piece of ground-truthing truth-grounding, free to enjoy at your end-of-season party, at a barbecue with the research team, on a Friday night out, or to contemplate in a soul-searching moment alone.
Yesterdays
Yesterdays
All this rubble was a public place
Now it looks as just another phase
Oh, I believe
in Yesterdays
Suddenly
All that’s left is this stratigraphy
And a context that’s so hard to see
Oh, Yesterdays went suddenly
How they had to go
I don’t know,
I couldn’t trace
I dug something wrong
Now I long for Yesterdays
Yesterdays
All these pretty finds were still in place
Now it looks as if they’re merely strays
Oh, I believe in Yesterdays
I will only find
what’s destroyed,
discarded, lost.
No organics left,
just a hole without a post.
Yesterdays
There was life, this was a happy place
But the colours faded all away,
and brown and grey remain for me.
Oh, I make digs at Yesterdays.
Bente Philippsen (The National Museum of Denmark and Aarhus University)
Søren M. Sindbæk (Aarhus University)