Untitled Document

Natural History Museum

This time it started
by them mocking the exhibits:

You're going to get your head kicked in again!

They sang like Sunderland away to Watford.
The massed attendants at the gallery-end
swaying and waving the retaining-ropes.

Meanwhile, the cloakies at the turnstile end
(conscious, as always, of their lower league status)
picked at the threads of another chant:

Que sera sera
Whatever that's died you see
ain't evolved like me
Que sera sera

This was more than a brief incident of inventing a phylum,
or the rearranging of the labels of a case of drosophilia.
This was collective, a racial memory. Even the scientists felt its pulse.

For next came the frenzy, the rampaging of halls,
the treading, the shredding, the naturalisation,
the smashing, the wrenching, the de-articulating of skeletons.

The news crews followed... huddled together
cabling snakes through the fractures of fossils.

They got footage of the fire that engulfed the basement,
the adding of eyes in the insect cases,
the bungee-ing cleaners, and the two curators
going hard at it in front of the dodos.

Then they slipped through the mob to the last exhibit

and there I sat
face behind glass.
The leader of the mob swung an axe,
through the glass, our reflections, the lights for the cameras,
through a thin veneer of civilisation
we need to call this a sporting occasion.

The mob chanted on:
Extinct! Extinct!

Pleased with the prospect of another three points.

Return to Poetry Homepage

Website http://www.gavinstewart.net
E-mail: Send an e-mail to the author