Member-only story
Rosetta Stone
We traded wax for kisses, put our lips upon it
What is the mind of a man who scratches
his name on a letter? To start something.
To end something. To buy or make or cast off.
To sincerely end with best wishes.
We traded wax for kisses, put our lips upon it.
Every note to the girlfriend, the banker,
the child, the king. We traded kisses for clicks,
for glassy taps, new ways to collect the scratches
we’ve put into clay for ten thousand years.
I came upon Rosetta in the fabric dark,
larger than I expected, white scratches
caught between three worlds of decree
and fastidious coronation. To be human,
is to write it down, immortal wine merchants,
our own hectares, erased in the floods, reborn
of bailing twine and pointed sticks stretched
to a clean square for all to see and measure.
We are moved by the stone, and by those
that would shape it, how it lasts longer
then everyone else, its immortal fiction
made true by those that will say it.
©️ Trapper Markelz 2022
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