The field of archaeology
studies rubbish
left by the likes of you and me,

the sum
of what remains
to show those distant future diggers
clues of who and what we were,
when perhaps all more central traces of us
are long gone,

and even our descendants’ memories
and their tales of us
have ceased
to let our little lives
live on. . .

the things still there
that maybe we forgot
or dropped
or threw away somewhere,
for which, even then perhaps long hence,
we’d ceased to care,

and longer still,
before our earthy forms
merged with the dirt,

in our camp, our village, city, factory,
or whatever size and shape of farms. . .

All that
just might remain
humanity’s full range
of how to wrap their brains
around the best facsimile
of what, in our brief stint
on this blue planet,

we
to the rest of our co-habitants
could possibly have meant
or been deemed worth.