Hi Arthur,
(I once saw a small mummy like this in an upstairs room in a museum in 
Warrington. Not the same one I guess... Oh, and they also had a Maori head 
on display and semed not to realise that the then current news items 
encouraging the return of such personal effects to New Zeland could be 
important for them too)
But the poem, the poem!
I guess it's a poem that's working by showing and "compare & contrast" - 
where details, in subtle ways, can illustrate or highlight what the poem is 
pointing to.
(And, hey, was this a time when British Forces were in Egypt, so was there a 
contemporary connection? Desert rats and desert foxes... I dunno)
(And was the museum implicititly implying that we - as white english sorts - 
were superior to everything we were displaying...)
Oh, I'm finding all sorts almost emerging from the glimpses I've 
discovered...
Have you tried it as a present tense narrative? Would that help to clarify 
things, issues, subjects? I mean the idea of the four cornered room full of 
artefacts from all round the world is already clear, but there's other 
things mentioned here too...
I sort of feel it's on that interesting borderline between story and 
poetry... and it can move one way or the other, or stay on that borderline 
if it wants to I guess, it's interesting!
Bob






>From: arthur seeley <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: New sub: The Mummy
>Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 08:43:00 +0100
>
>          The Mummy
>
>Silence hung like dust
>in the light through high windows.
>The still birds caught in flight,
>the eagle clamped on heathered rock
>rid a rabbit of its plaster bowels,
>beak and claw red and bright forever.
>The glass-eyed fox, “Vulpes vulpes”,
>teeth shone in rictus;
>I shaped the strange words with a quiet mouth,
>my reflection wraith and vague in glass.
>The sunlight, the silence, and the cases.
>
>Morbidity I suppose drew me often
>from the swings, the shouts and laughter of a spring day
>into the stillness of the municipal museum,
>where death glared and swung  in mockery of life.
>
>The mound of her nose and pits of eyes
>were all that called that yellow mud a face,
>the slender slope of shoulders
>and the taper to her ragged feet.
>About twelve she was, older than I, tiny,
>Princess of the Upper Nile,
>and those were her toe-bones, the label said;
>polished ocherous  pebbles.
>
>‘When the four corners of the earth shall meet
>you will rise again’: The hieroglyphs translated.
>When the birds swoop, the mute swan sings,
>the ape gibbers, the pinned spider scuttles,
>the fox yips and the eagle soars with dripping beak,
>those broken feet may dance again and mud laugh sweet as spring.


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