Heather Saunders Estes

I love palimpsests where old writings can be made to appear. Thrilled by a newly discovered painting by Rembrandt or a lost page from one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.

Abracadabra

– “AI helps decipher the text of a 2,000-year-old scroll burned at Pompeii.”
– Scientific American, 2024

The first word to appear from the still tightly
rolled scroll was “purple.”
Then a paragraph. Soon the entire text.
Now the world can begin reclaiming lost
writings of philosophers, poets and historians.
Can you imagine — more Sappho poems?
More Aristotle?

Hundreds of scrolls in just one Pompeii estate
yet to be read, translated to humanity’s delight.
Brittle papers stuffed in amphorae, hidden
in desiccated fertile crescent caves.
The unknown, forgotten — retrievable by magic

More Ovid, Songs of Solomon,
Egyptian chants, Homer, letters of Jeremiah.
Japanese scrolls burned in rice paper fires.
Unknown, till now, a second novel by the Lady Murasaki,
poems by Basho, equations of Shams al-Samarqandi?

The newest knowledge grants us a wish
to reveal secret writings of the oldest.