Gillian Clarke

Selected Poems

Lunchtime Lecture

And this from the second or third millenium

B.C., a female, aged about twenty-two.

A white, fine skull, full up with darkness

As a shell wth sea, drowned in the centuries.

Small, perfect. The cranium would fit the palm

Of a man's hand. Some plague or violence

Destroyed her, and her whiteness lay safe in a shroud

Of silence, undisturbed, unrained on, dark

For four thousand years. Till a tractor in summer

Biting its way through the longcairn for supplies

Of stone, broke open the grave and let a crowd of light

Stare in at her, and she stared quietly back.

As I look at her I feel none of the shock

The farmer felt as, unprepared, he found her.

Here in the museum, like death in hospital,

Reasons are given, labels, causes, catalogues.

The smell of death is done. Left, only her bone

Purity, the light and shade beauty that her man

Was denied sight of, the perfect edge of the place

Where the pieces join, with no mistakes, like boundaries.

She's a tree in winter stripped white on a black sky,

Leafless formality, brow, bough in fine relief.

I, at some other season, illustrate the tree

Fleshed, with woman's hair and colours and the rustling

Blood, the troubled mind that she has overthrown.

We stare at each other, dark into sightless

Dark, seeing only ourselves in the black pools,

Gulping the risen sea that booms in the shell.