'A Practice in Limits' - about the ethics of archaeology and bodies
this is for escapril day two, from my own prompt 'huge archaeological find'! it turned out longer and weirder than I planned but that's escapril for you lol....
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[Images ID: an original poem titled 'A Practice in Limits'. the poem is lineated. a '/' symbol will be used to communicate when a word is spaced out from the rest of the line/stanza. poem begins:
The house,
or what remained of it,
was to be torn down,
but the archaeologists pleaded
to let them excavate
before the deed was done.
The funding was hard to acquire,
but, finally,
the archaeologists
began their unearthing
of the old Victorian house
in Shrewsbury.
For once,
they needed no shovels,
instead they gloved up
and suited up,
and stepped into the
decaying brick
and mortar hollow.
The archaeologists picked apart
old furniture,
/ shattered windows,
rusted cans,
/ rotten food,
graffiti cannisters,
/ cigarette ends,
old needles,
/ rubbish bags,
every piece of
human abandonment
and revival.
But just as one builder
raised her sledgehammer to
knock out the wall
that would allow them
to rifle further,
there came a breath
from the house itself,
a / slow
wheezing thing
that sent dust flocking to block,
like crematory ash,
the few rays of sun
that could still penetrate
the murky window grime.
All tools were dropped,
aside from their notebooks, of course,
the archaeologists backed / away
looking in horror as
crumbling bricks began to shift,
and the voice spoke to them
directly:
Can I not be left alone,
even now?
I ask for nothing,
I test the limits of my own needs,
test the boundaries of my own
necessities, hollow out my
carcass. Is
privacy the last thing
I am to lose?
The archaeologists fell
to their knees,
up to their shins
in shards and splinters,
but the lead archaeologist
stayed standing,
spoke for the others,
apologised for such brutality,
their ravenous need
to always know everything.
Forgive us,
he said,
We did not know
something could look like this
and still be alive.
The old Shrewsbury house
said nothing else,
and the lead archaeologist
turned to his crew,
eyes teeming with
parasitic life and
red from dust
or hunger;
This is a huge
archaeological find,
a perfect
study
in human suffering.
And so, its bones
were taken out of Shrewsbury,
its flesh displayed in the
unfamiliar cold halls
and walls of glass
of the so-called
British
Museum.
The house was demolished
as planned,
as it turns out,
the council already knew
of its once humanity,
but profits
have to be made. The house
never spoke again,
but everytime the fireplace was lit,
the chimney coughed out
the vile smoke from its lungs,
and everytime the family sat
around the dining room table
with no extra plate
set / out
the windows wailed and
/ rattled
at the dismay of
being once again
forgotten.
What is the line
between
/ remembrance
and
/ objectification?
The old Shrewsbury house
had only asked
one final question
of the hungry excavators,
one that none answered:
Why study the past,
the archaic brutality,
when the same suffering
can be observed
in the house of your neighbour?
Is it more
reassuring
to think that
it is only a
thing
of the past?
end poem. in the bottom right corner of the page, the writer is credited as 'Ren H.' End ID].
