a thousand years

All the things I’d say to you and all the things I’d ask

when far from home they find our bones once a thousand years have passed.

They’ll try to reconstruct you from the scattered parts they find;

they’ll take our bones and think they know our dimmed and distant lives.

All the things I’d say to you and all the things I’d ask

if our bones should lie together by some miracle of chance.

In nights lost to living memory we once mirrored this embrace;

I was maddened by your strangeness, crazed by flesh that’s long decayed.

All the things I’d say to you and all the things I’d ask

now that tourists come to look at us behind the thumb-smeared glass.

Curators say there is no way to know what we once were;

crowds are squinting out a language to decode our ancient hurt.

All the things I’d say to you and all the things I’d ask.

We can scrawl our motivations on the thumbprint-laden glass,

or keep them close and on our bones they’ll read what we confess.

They can circulate their theories in the academic press.

All the things I’d say to you and all the things I’d ask,

don’t you realise that your answers are all priceless artefacts?

With our jaw bones stained and broken and our tongues long turned to ash,

we can find a time for talking once a thousand years have passed.