On the ruins of Göbekli Tepe

High above old Urfa, dusty and lone,

Was raised a mighty temple, to outlast

The young Acropolis by four times past,

Its pillars carved grotesque by tools of bone.

While we revere great Egypt's works in stone,

What of these phantoms of an elder past,

Who chased the deer, and gathered grains and mast,

Still having built naught else to call their own?

Their gods stand silent, and the stone-age eye

That sought them empty, and yet what survives

Speaks eloquently still, and gives the lie

To claims that after civil life arrives

Religion that controls; men though they sigh

Let empires fall, while Faith to build them strives.