He was digging ; his fingers
had worked through the raveled mittens
so that I noticed
the green crescent of his thumb nail.
Gladiolus bulbs
lay in a fibrous heap around him.
He wanted them out
before the winter got them.
Behind him, as the sun
came out for an instant,
the Cotswolds flashed an after - rain smile
and rooks swung high.
"They nested here once."
he said, pointing
to the bowering elms across the road,
'before the traffic flushed them out'.

He took me in for lunch,
a salad and a casserole
washed down with ale.
It was when pouring coffee
that I asked, 'When will you talk
of Mohenjo Daro?'
His lips cracked, his dentures smiled
'What is there to say
except that I was there
when the first ceramic shards came out
and the terra-cotta figurines.
The thrill of the first seal,
the humped bull standing majestic,
with his dewlap like a sail unfurled.'

'They flourished for a thousand years
and when the bed of the river rose
their cities rose with it,
the ground - plan never changing.
Nine strata of the city we shovelled off,
skinning the onion layers
where pasts had settled over earlier pasts.'

'A Gilgamesh motif on a seal,
a man fighting two tigers,
Sent me voyaging to Sumer,
argosies sailing up the Tigris
laden with Indian cotton;
a turquoise bead, a lapis lazuli trinket
brought canvas from Tabriz and Shraz,
the harness-bells jingling, dogs barking
as the centuries waved to each other
on the crossroads.'

'Glinting out of the rubble
a copper axe with a shaft-hole
cried out to me,
superior to anything the Indus people made -
their axe heads lashed to handles
had no chance against the invaders.
An Armenoid skull told me where he came from
and the street rang with his war-cries.'

'There are evenings my house is unlit.
I sit watching the rooks settling into the trees,
and cars scream past on the M-40.
Headlights vault in through windows,
shadows clean the wall and sail away.
A wind of reflections rustles the curtains
as I think of the Indus people.
For a thousand years the brewery of life
fermented and stank there, seething in the vats.
Passions worked themselves out,
seasons and festivals went round
like bullocks on a threshing floor.
They were a happy people, even their bondmen
had brick cottages with two rooms.
Then like a geological shift
a people came from the north,
and I came upon a hearth
with cold cinders, four thousand years old.'

'Why didn't I write about all this?
That's a good question.
But Tutenkhamen was the rage then,
the Pharaoh's gold-mask and the Pharaoh's curse.
Who cared about the Indus then?
Now it is too late;
I search for memories,
they have swung away like the rooks.
I dig for words
and I can't find them.'