BCE

Breakfast milk, earlier today.

This poem came from its epigram, a Kurt Vonnegut line that struck me while I was reading Slaughterhouse-Five.  If you've not read Kurt I recommend him.  He's a SF author, but also very much about everyday life; philosophical without being full of himself.

If he has a flaw it's that he's a little too aware of trying for an 'everyman' quality, of making his characters all John Q Public, but you have to respect his trying.

Anyway, as I only took the one line, and then completely reinterpreted it, you won't find a lot of him in this.


BCE, of course, stands for "Before the Common Era", which is what archaeologists now say in an attempt to remove the built-in cultural bias of "BC".  Personally I prefer MYA (Million Years Ago) but that's for dinosaurs.

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BCE

Everybody is supposed to be dead,
to never say anything or want anything ever again.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Time happened so long ago.
The milkman's note is deep carved
dead-language, symbolic, on the door frame.

Evidence for breakfast can be sifted
from the archaeological layer:
people ate toasted grains, bread,
fruit preserved in storage jars.

They may have wanted extra pints
which the milkman didn't leave.

If I still spoke that language
I would pull a message from the potsherds,
write a learned paper, a coffee table book,
show how civilisation faltered
a voice was raised
a door was slammed...

It was all over long ago—
I make notes with some detachment.