Corpus Vile Poem by Christine De Luca

Some museums of antiquities store row on row of
unnamed skulls. There is a day of reckoning now
a plea to repatriate lost souls, bring home bones

to territorial rest. Is it surprising the rituals we wrap
round death? Anguish felt at bodies missing, ungraved,
when loss is certain? How many symbolic coffins

have been lowered, wounds eased with the thud
of gentle earth on unimagined emptiness? There is
fierce beauty in a skeleton picked clean as carrion,

a recycling of our elementalness. Here, in this museum,
skeletons catalogued, studied carefully, are unlikely
to raise a court case. Few would want these bones back,

a rickle of deformity. Yet there is beauty in these harp
shapes: curved, sculptural. A spine bent back upon itself,
with vertebrae on which a seraph might make music.

I remember visiting a little girl in hospital, one Sunday,
a steel rod newly planted in her clarsach of a back; by
the next Sunday, stringed melody: for her, hinc sanitas.

Leaving the museum, how fine to see children jostle
for a bus; tall, straight; even their teeth wondrously
aligned, their body temples still unplundered.

Rickle: (Scots) a rickety structure or collection