At the British Museum

They put Snow White in a glass coffin
for wide-eyed gawping at death - a sleeping beauty;
but you are shrivelled leather, resin-brown,
divested of linen bands, dried fruit:
a wrinkled prune, hollowed to sunken bone.

In the midst of death we are in life.
I fancy you’d have known such crowds
in ancient Thebes: a thronging Pharaonic mass
in awe of sun gods doubly crowned.
This airless vacuum displays the arid fact
of death, despite embalmers' assiduous art.

The hectic living glaze a passing minute
before the brittle fibres, desert-sunk
for two millennia; your lack of after-life
is finally boring; your sucked-out remnants pale
to insignificance. Life demands our time.

Had we your starry wonder, dawning dreams
of spirit housed in sacred flesh, preserved
by jackal-headed Anubis, Ra-like reborn
from birthing Nut in morning mists of Nile -
but we are bound to earth in a dry century.

Tracey -

You know, I'm not connecting with this (yet), and I'm sure it's me being a flawed reader. I'll be revisiting here to live with these words...

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~~~t~~~

Leanne -
Well, I am... I've never felt tremendously happy about the graverobbing that mummies represent, given the uproar when someone desecrates a cemetary these days. It seems to me just another manifestation of our idea that we own everything, or have a right to. It's very easy to think of these museum "objects" as property, but the fact remains that once, thousands of years ago this woman woke each morning to a sun not so different from the one shining today. She was a child, probably had as difficult an adolescence as any teen today, fell in love, had children of her own, maybe even lived to hold grandchildren... would her people, who held such reverence for the dead and the mysticism of the afterlife, have paraded shrivelled corpses for schoolchildren?

Tracey -

You see, sometimes it takes an academic...

I understood the imagery, which is clear. When I say I didn't connect it's that I didn't get a "feeling" around this. I will stay with this, and attempt to be more articulate in a future post.

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~~~t~~~

Alcuin of York -
The repetition of "sun" in S2L4 doesn't really work for me. Though (I assume) you intended the double use to be a play on words, they come across as awkward repetition. Perhaps something more like, "...striding the earth." would get your message across.

I found "Life demands our time" odd at first, but the more I reread it, the better I liked it. I also liked your repeated use of images relating to light: Sun, glaze, pale (a double meaning, whether you intended it or not), starry, dawning, etc.

And you're right - our century is like the shrivelled corpses, despite the bellicose strutting and constant blares, just two of the currently popular mannerisms we admire.

In Portland here, we had an exhibition made of corpses that had been stripped of skin to various degrees, set in various poses of activities (like preparing to bat a ball), then encased in plastic. Supposedly educational, "Body Worlds 3" is macabre in every sense. When the exhibition was in Seattle, an organ was stolen from one of the figures, but was later recovered. Some consider it art. I consider it yechh.

I do disagreed with Leanne on one thing. The Ancient Egyptians had an obsession with death that exceeded ours. The only difference is that they did not pretend otherwise.

Alcuin

Tracey -

I've heard about those exhibitions...ew.

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~~~t~~~

Leanne -

I don't think we have an obsession with death at all. I think we have an obsession with control over everything, and because we can't control death we want to control that which is already dead.

U668857 -

Many thanks for all the stimulating comments. I've changed the sun repetition - "doubly crowned" refers to the double crown of Pharaonic regalia - also we get a nice near-rhyme with "crowds"...(thanks to Alcuin).

I have to agree with Leanne...there's something amiss with displaying corpses in this way...I wanted to convey that sense of this once being a living breathing human being now far from home in every sense...but what seemed to come out was more a commentary on delusional religion..a sort of snub to a belief in afterlife...but then I contradict myself in that last stanza, where the romance of myth/religion is almost preferable to our modern prosaic sensibility too accustomed to fast-paced shallow living. I think we're life-obsessed, not death-obsessed...maybe a healthy balance of both is requisite? BRgds.,Alan.