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My First Arrowhead
By Don Iannone

Children have to explore,
That's how they learn stuff,
Little things teach them,
like finding a flint triangle
in a freshly plowed farmer's field.
I remember the first one I ever found,
It was light gray,
Just the base of the arrowhead,
Maybe the tip broke off
and got stuck in the killed animal.
Even with just half,
I could imagine what the whole thing looked like.
Yep, it was a real nice one,
and it was mighty old,
I mean real old.
Maybe hundreds,
Or thousands,
or even,
Millions
of years ago,
some warrior wearing an animal skin,
chipped a hunk of flint
into a nifty tool.
Arrowheads are art too, you know,
the kind that kids like,
because you can do stuff with it.
Strapping the stone triangle
to the end of a straight stick,
the Indian created an arrow,
which of course,
he used to bag his family's dinner.
Pfft goes the arrow,
and kurplunk goes the animal
onto the ground.
It happened just like that,
or that's what I think.
We shouldn't feel bad about
the animal having to die,
Indians had to eat too.
Wild berries and nuts don't fill you up,
so Indians had to eat animals.
Do you think Indians decided
they wanted to eat animals first
and that caused them to invent arrowheads?
Or did they accidently make an arrowhead
and that gave them the idea to hunt animals?
Hum, I'll have to ask my Dad when I get home.
Either way it all started with flesh-eating,
No need for arrowheads to grow vegetables.
Someone should write that down
in a history text book or something,
That was my first history lesson,
Not from some dumb book though,
It was the walking around kind of learning,
That's the best kind, don't you think?
It made me late for lunch,
you know--thinking exactly what
Indians did with arrowheads.
Mom wasn't happy about me being late,
or me getting my school shoes muddy,
but some times you have to do these things,
you know, to learn stuff.

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