Hisarlik

Carl Blegen figured out they'd dug too far;
this stone-age village can't be fabled Troy.
The House of Priam long predates the war
when Helen ran off with her Asian boy.
A modern archaeologist's appalled;
he'd do it differently were he a mensch.
The Schliemann crew demolished storied walls;
defenses gods had built, smashed for a trench.
Four levels up, they found the storage bins
securing siege-time rations in hewn stone.
The gold he photographed Sophia in
was found somewhere; location still unknown.
A site like Troy's gets built, and built again
more valuable than battlements, or men.

horizons

the Clovis people can't have been the first
we've found tools made millenia before
and yet, their devastation was the worst
for megafauna, they struck like a war
a world of giants gone, with scarce a trace
their local equilibrium upset
uncautious of this upstart human race
within a thousand years, they'd all been et
how many colonies failed to take root
like Greenland's Vikings flourished for a day
but seeking el Dorado and its loot
have faded like a wisp of smoke, away
who knows how much a single species' worth
ourselves, we've been a plague upon this Earth

lesser son of greater sires

the tracks of theropods lead straight to birds
unbroken lineage of DNA
if "dinosaurs" are gone, that's merely words
they flit among us to this very day
the Alvarezes found Iridium
that's otherwise uncommon in Earth's crust
and speculated where it had come from
to mark the K-T bound'ry in the dust
few specialists were up to such a test
most species went extinct, but some made do
when worlds collapse, an opportunist's best
positioned to transmit its genome through

a kingly line's diminished much, of late
T. Rex's heir lies roasted on my plate