A Stone-Age Man Confronts His Son (or, Ug's Sonnet)

by

Carl Olsen

You call me Neolithic Luddite, which,
of course, is true, because I will not touch
the shiny tin, the copper spades now wrought
by young men where my father's father sought
the perfect rock, soft earth’s hard veins with scarred
and calloused hands, the shaper shaped and carved
just like the tool. And so I frown upon
your metals, formed in hells stoked far beyond
the needs of life, a void of abstract stuff,
from context freed, to hold your mental fluff. 
You know, I think, deep down inside, that much
is wrought which ought not be, lest tool in turn
upon us wreak a forced division, such
that mind would lose the earth, the given spurned. 

 

 

 

Carl Olsen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Scandinavian Department at UC-Berkeley, where he is working on a dissertation on the Old Norse "shield-poems." He has previously had a short story and a poem published in Fables. You can find out more about his studies and his writing at his website.

 

 

 

 

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