the weekly poem.com

Something Old, Something New

Your face is hard:
the charred skin like leftover metal,
the river-map on your chin.

You remind me of someone
I've never met – it's those sprigs
of coal in your right eye,

the laundered sheet
tugged over your ghost shoulders,
the way your feet

poke out at the end,
every toe gone gangrene-black,
the way they're splayed.

Everything about you smells
of smoke; perhaps
your entrails are ashen, too.

Your buck teeth
are stuck for words; you stare
out of your mirror,

unspeakable. Kiln-fired,
your mask beneath the mask of gold
is sold, is as cold

and still and brittle,
as the shocked and tortured corpses
of the lost

who litter the landscape.
Look at your form.
Pure desert storm.

Click here for article in The Times

Something Old, Something New
The face and feet of Tutankhamun were put on display for the first time, 85 years after the discovery of his sarcophagus, and about 3,300 years after his death.
7 November 2007

POETRY KIT WEBRING

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