• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content

New Writing

  • Subjects
  • Latest
Poetry

A King’s Bones

Imogen McHugh

Two poems from Imogen McHugh’s new poetry book, A King’s Bones, published by Dempsey and Windle on 1 June 2022.

 

A King’s Bones

The earth is full of breath and silent prisoners

the clay and the worm, the sigh of the seasons

do not make a restful place for a king’s bones.

I have seen the earth build a palace above my body

in the image of splendour. Crusty diamonds, soiled silk

the remnants of so many little lives lived, lonely.

I have slept too long in this darkest womb.

The noises of men begin again for me, the taper and scrape

into toiling and triumph. Hands less clumsy

liberate the lime, acid sand and at last, my limbs.

There is the touch of the fresh air and the empty sky,

the human face with coloured eyes and mournful mouth.

Human flesh pressed to human bone

tenderness to this broken form, the linger of a fingertip;

I was tossed, naked to humiliation and despair

only to be lifted like a lover. Somebody is weeping.

The bones: the relics of a life destroyed by hand and word

afterwards in the mouths of men and children.

What is a bone to you, with your trembling touch?

Will you hear the story from he who saw it all?

 

 

Skeleton

This skeleton has become its own punishment,

its own malformed nightmare and disappointment

to be born whole, to see myself crumble

child-body into adult, life becoming terminal.

As plants curl towards light away from darkness

I began to curve in upon myself.  To hide.

I have felt pain in all its forms, the ache

in the thrum of my own heartbeat.

An invisible haunting, a ghost in my own form

is this a god-given gift? A mark of difference

these bones have known more than yours,

the creak and shudder of an inner darkness

shrinking my rib cage, crunching vertebra

as my body changed so young. I changed too.

Is there a burden so heavy as that of difference?

Knowing that there is so much to hide,

in death our flaws exaggerate themselves

our deformities deform themselves, bones in knots

tied into new stories. The spine becomes a snake,

the man becomes a demon in his death.

Pain changes everything.

 

 

Share this post:

Reader Interactions

contactsubmissionsabout
design and development: Blackman Rossouw