When Ted Hirschfield first came to Cape Girardeau in 1964, in his spare time he investigated the mounds and village sites built by the Indians who occupied these lands many hundreds of years before Europeans came.

Within a 10-mile radius of Cape Girardeau, in towns like Ware and McClure, Ill., and a few spots within the city itself, he found places where walks in the fields yielded pottery fragments and projectile points. There he says he also found peace and a link to an ancient people.

"The best education I ever got was out in those fields," says Hirschfield, who retired to Florida in 1995 after 30 years as an English professor at Southeast.

Now the University of Florida Press has published Hirschfield's "Middle Mississippians: Encounters with the Prehistoric Amerindians." The poetry book, his third, is both a paean to the culture he pursued during 30 years of amateur archaeology and a lament for the antiquities lost "in the geographic blender."

In the poem "Mississippian Petroglyphs, Fountain Bluff, Illinois," he describes both the enchantment of coming face to face with the remains of an ancient civilization and the irony of finding them among "the secular graffiti of the holy."

The poem refers to the petroglyphs at Gorham.

Another poem, "Temple Mound, Cape Girardeau, Missouri," mourns the loss of a mound that took millions of basketloads of earth to build, now "Divided up by the foot and dollar/And bulldozed down by a Caterpillar."

Hirschfield's poetry is edged in anguish that our own culture did not value the Middle Mississippians enough to try to treasure their artifacts.

"I feel a sense of loss," he said from his home in Lehigh Acres, near Fort Myers.

"You can't help but transfer that sense of loss to our own culture. We value even less than they did."

The mounds he found across the Mississippi River, 30 to 40 feet tall, "are gone now," he says. "I saw the last phase of the agricultural destruction of these remains."

Hirschfield wrote the book in May 1994, one poem a day. "I tried not only to profile the culture but to memorialize those remains," he said.

He thinks the Middle Mississippians were happier than we moderns.

"There is no home place for most Americans. The family structure has been destroyed. People live for their jobs," he says.

"I don't see religion having an effect, politics is in disarray and universities have become battlegrounds for ideologies."

The Middle Mississippians knew their relationship to nature and had a healthier view of life and death, he says. "The objects they made were imbued with life."

In more than one poem, Hirschfield alludes to the effect finding an artifact has had on him. The perception of time deepens, he says.

"You are the first human being to touch it in a thousand years. You are in effect making symbolic contact with whoever made it and the culture they belonged to."

"...It borders on a religious experience," he said.

SURFACE HUNTERS

In better times they were eccentrics,

Antiquarians and generally respected

For being different without a fault.

Today they are considered anti-social

For being sane and self-contained,

Mislabeled for preferring solitude.

Some you only know by distant rumor

and ten rows over in an open field,

Walking away in opposite directions.

Others are self-discovered alcoholics,

Walking off their penance to the past:

All who are born out of their time

Or simply trading their addictions

Dead at the center of their visions.

All looking for something tangible,

Walking between the seams of time,

Humping the chasms of the present.

Anything made by the hand of man.

bending over, touch and pick it up.

It's better than a human handshake.

ending up in personal possession

And good enough to last a lifetime,

A living communion with the dead:

Loudest affirmation of the present.

-- Ted Hirschfield