i never heard her voice or read her poems
and yet she taught me much about our past.
i think i might have seen a photograph
of mary leakey, holding up the bones
that she discovered. that pale dome
was someone's skull three million years ago,
those tools were someone's work. her own
were fragile too. no volcano
has cast her footprints for me. all i know
is that she was a woman, and she learned
some hard-earned truths herself. and all i hope
is that these not be lost, or else return
like the bones and stones beneath the ground
that were so long a secret, and then found.
(10 December 1996)