Translated from the Italian by Jessica Harkins
This incomplete skeleton became Lucy in ’74
and lucent for a few American anthropologists,
but the remains are not enough to offer us
a portrait of the early phases of human evolution.
By coincidence, that same year, in May
I was born a month before I was due,
her three million years against my thirty-seven on the Earth
bear witness to cobwebs of infinity
between a fossil and a primate that follow me
into the darkest corners of an already confused story.
From within the species
And yet in the fragment of every memory,
in the nature of a smile that reaches, sometimes, beyond
our gaze
we caress the vertigo with one hand
held back by an unnatural obstacle,
and yet, from within the species,
everyone tries to ease their pain with a sliver,
with proofs imagined outside of every possible
horizon of astonishment.
Photo by Vlad Kutepov on Unsplash
Sediba (source)
Plummeting into a cave that they would never
leave again,
the skeletons form in a perfect circle a family.
A nine-year-old child found them while wandering off
to play.
The bodies have weak heels, a sign the hominids
still climbed to eat or to defend themselves
on the trees,
the feet suggest an upright position,
the arms are muscular like those of an ape,
the opposable thumbs could move like the magnetic north
that coincided with the geographic south,
perhaps due to the overturning of the terrestrial field.
