It's striking to be in a place that has been inhabited for centuries, centuries of people leaving their mark on the same city. I was especially struck in the Vatican Museums by the gathered funerary art of different eras and cultures. Widespread and different religions and ideas, all grappling with the reality of death. It was a kind of release to read in an Egyptian exhibit that one of their names for "The Book of the Dead" was "The Book of Coming Forth by Day".
We gather up the pieces
The battered stone fragments
Into rooms with clean edges
And study the vocabulary
Of their fossilized shadows
Stone effigies worn smooth
By the steps of the centuries
But the bells ring clear across the countryside
The billboards and the cobblestones
I snapshot the sword he was buried with
The pitch of the haunting chant
Buries sharply into my side
The sweeping of the grey curves
The slipping back through the pages
To where an old woman huddles into her white cape
Against the chill of the coming night
The piercing blue of the midnight Mass
When villages were a handful of people
And the standing speechless in a hayfield
While the battle of Britain circles the sky above
And I stand outside the tent alone in the dark
Because I did not want him to be less than he is
So I will wait as they fill the great stone jars
Flaked and mismatched, green with moss
Wait with the Egyptians and museum-goers
The wimple wearers and the RAF pilots
With Nineveh and Gilgamesh lost in the sand
In hope that one day I will dance again
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