It has been talking for a thousand years, in the language of earth and artifact, in the slow transformation of its mounds through time, in the way the morning light falls across the Grand Plaza at the equinoxes when the sun rises in the same direction it has always risen — the direction that the builders of Woodhenge learned to read and encoded in a monument of wood that is long gone but whose meaning, in the alignment of the sunrise with the landscape, is still present for those who know how to look.

A city once stood here.

One of the largest in the world in its time.

Built by Native people whose descendants are still here.

Still being understood.

Still being studied.

Still, in the mounds that survived everything that tried to erase them, still there.

— FINAL END —