Sue Whitmore
The Weevils
Here in our pyramid
we eat our way,
eat our way through grains of wheat,
weevils in the dark.
Nothing stops us;
we eat and eat our grains of wheat -
those relics of the sun -
till they are gone,
till there is nothing in the dry clay pot,
nothing in the darkness of the dry clay pot,
but husks.
Across the darkness
is the dried out husk of the mighty pharoah,
meeting his own darkness with eyes of granite,
his likeness in encaustic paint
and his body approximated
in bitumen, bandages and gilded wood.
His wisdom is preserved in a canopic jar,
as is his faithful heart and his rotten liver.
The gold and lapiz magic of his walls
is painted black for eternity,
his music, piled in dumb instruments against the walls,
is in harmony with the absolute silence.
His atoms, in the anaerobic airlessness of death
are as ancient, and as extinct, as ours,
the Great Weevils of Egypt.