Underworld

During lunch breaks office workers
nosed the plate glass windows
vying for news of the silent drama
enacted far below, watching each day
as ground was marked out and sifted
and how masked men in white suits
robbed yet another grave in the winter soil.
in life we are…
Stan in despatch kept a tote
on how many bodies would be lifted
before the summer's end,
ten, twenty, a thousand?
...in death
They almost smelled the earth as
forensically they searched their lunches
and joked by the coffee machine.
At night bleached bones glinted in their dreams.

Below the evictions widened out
through charnel house and plague pit,
from citizens facing Jerusalem to the east
so come the day of judgement they'd arise,
to paupers pitchforked dancing to this grave,
jawbones gaping, aghast in mock denial,
ring a ring o' roses…
fearful that their day of trial had come, this
putrefaction punishing their misdeeds.
…we all fall down

The site developer often stalked the plot
checking on earth turned by JCB's,
steel towers rising above the graveyard,
his corner of the city, his future stake,
conscious that the money paid for delving graves
brought him cachet,
dust to dust…
might keep his ghosts away.

The TV location team dressed girls
in hempen cloth and pulled suggestively
laden carts across our screens,
bring out your dead…
for a cheap shot between a serial killer and
Serbian war graves.
…bring out your dead

The earth holds another secret yet;
the East End princess waits in middle earth
silent in her stone overcoat, laid out young
with her dead child, iridescent oil bottles by her side,
lacking the Mediterranean glamour of her youth,
carpe diem…
she waits in state for her gods to take her.

Sifting the ground for insect, bone and jewel,
measuring layers, through midden and cesspit,
the rescue archaeologist is at his happiest
obsessive on his knees in rubbish and debris;
…ashes to ashes
he knows he would be happy to end up like this,
in a warm trench, facing up towards the moon,
necklaced in shells, arms crossed in repose,
his trowels and gloves hieratic by his side.

Somewhere above a labourer's tranny
belts out a techno anthem to a busy nation:
rise up, dance your cares away,
rise up and dance your cares away.

© Jacqueline Mézec

(This poem was placed second in the Jersey Evening Post Writing Competition of 2000)

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