PAD Day 20: Future Artifacts

 Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write an "animal" poem, and (2) write a poem "exploring a particular object or place from the point of view of some far-off, future scientist."

The second prompt is always intriguing because it forces the writer to look at something from an objective but remote or "alien" perspective. One of my favorite poems of this type is "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," by British poet Craig Raine. You can read it here. I took a recently-coined word referring to an animal that caused me a little confusion when I first read it, and projected that confusion onto future scientists finding a coffee mug with that word printed on it.  I wrote it with long line breaks to look like poetry, but it could just as easily be paragraphs of prose.

Granddog
 
Our team of archaeologists has made a significant, if puzzling discovery.
It is an ceramic drinking vessel with a message in ancient English,
which we have translated as, "I love my Granddog."
As with many artifacts we have found from this period,
the word "love" is represented by a red heart symbol.
But what is puzzling is the word "granddog."
 
We know that these ancient humans kept domestic animals
called "dogs" in their homes, the descendants of wild wolves.
And we know that a "grandchild" was the child of one's own children.
But this hybrid term has led to some debate as to its meaning.
Some historians theorize that it means the dog of one's own grown children.
Some believe it represents the offspring of one's own domesticated dog.
And some even theorize that this ancient race, which we know
experimented with genetic engineering, created a human/dog hybrid.
(However, we have no pictorial evidence of this.
Perhaps the results were too grotesque to document.)  
 
Still others believe that the word is mistranslated or misspelled,
and should be two words (grand dog),
with "grand" meaning of excellent quality and/or great size.
We do know that this ancient race kept domesticated cats
which were of immense size, possibly even larger than their masters,
often overpowering them. We know this as the result of our discovery
of a shirt-like garment with the inscription,
"Sorry I'm late—my cat was sitting on me."