Two Poems by Rishan Singh

PROSIMIANS, TARSOIDS AND ARTHROPOIDS

You have persisted arboreality,

modifying your traits for us, Homo sapiens.

Occupying SE Asia, the savannas, tropical and subtropical forests,

you’ve paved the way, leaving prints of your pride,

prints of puberty, prints of perfection,

the scars of your historical scavenging.

Enviously today, our eyes, eye your primal deeds,

nevertheless you confer these features of forward-directed eyes.

Your skeletal repertoire, an advantage to bonobos and man,

with backbone and bipedal astroundment;

latterly freeing our once grounded hands,

for movements of opposition and prehensition.

Our bow-shaped jaws and mixed diet habits,

an inheritance of primal inheritance,

programming us with skills of ironic complex social-unity

and language agility through arboreal neural enhancements.

You (Tarsoids) live, still giving medium glamourfication

to great-Earth origins by the billions,

tho’ extant between Prosimians and Arthropoid changes.

But, who are you? Are you Post-theos?

THE UNSOLVED MYSTERY

(Unlocking speculation, Neanderthals unveiled unexpectedly in 1856,

a place of self-derived entitlement, the Neander Valley in Germany)

Modern humanity personified by your disappearance,

traces of your extantion preserved for popular

unearthed pro-extinct hominin scientific exhibitions.

You were the foundation of pre-human,

leaving traits of (great)cranial-intellect 128 000 years old

in Krapina Croatia, sharing landscapes for 60 000 years in

Uzbekistan and Siberia fossilizing,

for Homo sapiens fame-fossilis.

You diverged genetically from H. sapiens,

but set the branch of modern speech that’s abused.

Everyday, we turn over a new stone,

exploiting your contemprous tool kits to

care and adorn, metabolize but not cannibalize.

Enduring cold conditions to ‘extinction’,

you fought with pain, slendering stocky bodies

to symmetrical torsos of civilization,

now exposed to earth’s crisis of excess greenhouse gases.

But, what happened to you? Are you still alive?

Rishan Singh is a South African, prize-winning, poet who was born in KwaZulu-Natal, a province in which the city of Durban in based in the Republic of South Africa. He has had poetry published in journals and books and is recognised in 5 different countries. Writing is one of his professions.