A poem by Katie Sullivan
Do not publish, copy or redistribute without my permission.
You’re a pitiful, wrinkled figure
trapped in a glass sarcophagus,
yourself more fragile than glass.
Empty eyes staring at nothing.
Fingers like twigs dug out of river mud.
Shreds of fabric entangled in the folds
of flesh still barely preserved
after all these centuries.
So brittle and ancient.
Rows of kids clamor and shove
to gawk at you for a few seconds
and then scramble to get away,
screwing up their faces
and shouting "Eew! Gross!"
I watch from the corner
jostled by squealing Girl Scouts.
Three millennia from now, will one of us
be on display in a museum,
our mortal remains lying in state
like a Halloween diorama
for future generations
to squirm and flinch at?
You were once someone
important enough to deserve mummification.
You probably never left home without
taking care to look your best.
Now we don’t even know for certain
which gender you are, you’re such a mess.
When the priests anointed you and
committed you to the tomb
they intended you to go to the Afterlife
glorious and renewed,
not trapped in a display case
in Minnesota, an unknown
and distant land of lakes and snow,
a hemisphere away.
Who’s to say where your soul is now?
But your body is a curiosity in a museum
alongside rhinos, bears and gnus
posed dramatically by taxidermists.
They’re easier to look at than you.
Something is amiss, here.
You have had no say in the matter.
But here you are, the object of our revulsion
And, to a few, of our pity.
