Petroglyphs on the Lewis and Clark Trail By Dennis Goza

Petroglyphs on the Lewis and Clark Trail
  
Fifty feet above a persistent spring
on a cliff too scarped for modern feet to scale,
crafty ancients did the usual thing:
cryptic runes graffitoed in the shale
spell out a life in ocher and umber
in whatever language they could invent-
stressed now by storms of debatable number
and character. We grapple with their intent:
Perhaps they dared us, like them, to dare it all.
We descended from those who did not fall. 

Dennis Goza won his first prize for poetry at the age of 19. A playwright and actor as well as poet, he has been touring the U.S, since 1992, entertaining children and their adults. While a film critic and actor in San Francisco, he was involved in the founding of the San Francisco International Fringe Festival. He has written more than a dozen plays for the theatre company he co-founded, and has composed the music for many of the productions. His plays have been produced in festivals in Chicago, San Diego, Houston and North Carolina. His poetry has been published in Clockhouse, Gemini, Dime Show Review, River River, Waccamaw Journal, Barely South Review, The Finger and The Helix ; and he has published a volume of poems, Tortoise Dances.