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”
