“free verse poem humans are noble savages”

We stand, astonished, upright—  
thumbs curved into longing,  
eyes searching wide distances  
for meaning and meat.  
A patchwork of mud and bone,  
we cross the savannah in borrowed skins,  
echoes of arrows rattling our ribs.

We are a combed-back tangle  
of instinct and aspiration,  
half-remembering the smell of fires  
kindled in the darkness—  
the warmth we conjured  
from the flint and shiver of need.

Our language is the marrow  
of hunger and hope;  
we praise the sunrise, gather it in song,  
lift children skyward like offerings  
to blue gods and cold wind.

Look at us building:  
villages, cathedrals, machines  
that hum with impossible knowledge,  
scrawling equations and odes  
in the same hands that once  
shaped spears of sharpened stone.

Beneath the veneer—  
the suits and wires and supermarket lights—  
we are not far from the wild bramble’s heart,  
where the river’s cold bite sings  
remembrance into our blood.

Yet how quick we are to mercy,  
to laughter, to singing old wounds whole—  
we kill and we comfort,  
grasping for grace  
in the raw, beautiful calculus  
of being human:  
noble, savage,  
never only just one or the other  
but always, forever, both.

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