The Early Archaeologists Poem by David Cooke

Their patience an absolute they had fostered
on quaint erudition, they came to dig
the unsaleable tracts at the limits
of their own late empires: their vision too big
unless at last dust unleashed its secrets.

Polymaths and adventurers, whose faith
resided in biblical quotes and place names,
they tramped like prophets,
hoping their path would lead them to fame
once out of the wilderness of hunches.

Taking years themselves, they worked
through levels of time, disclosing
the chart of settlement heaped on settlement.
As methodology loomed to obsession
they sifted unglamorous fragments.

Dazed by the surge of dynasties,
a vast chronology swamps me, dims perspectives
whose light might fathom sand-locked eras;
leaves me pronouncing names on a list,
turning over the dross of eroded lives.