Poetry Corner #1

In a rather lazy attempt to class up the joint, I decided to begin a poetry corner. People like poems, right? Okay, well I like poems and guess what? It's my blog and if I want to post poems I will! So there!

I figured I'd start with one I particularly like. I actually wrote a paper on this one years ago for some class. The paper is long gone, but I still like the poem. If any of you out there have poem suggestions, please feel free to leave them. (Also, if you're nice to me I may try to locate some of my really appalling high school poetry, which is always good for a laugh.)

The British Museum
by Miroslav Holub

To the tune of "Bolero,"
any ark
will be ruined
once, the trilingual
Rosetta Stone will be broken, steles of Hallcarnassus
will turn to dust, sandstone Assyrian spirits
with eagle heads will shyly take off,
the carved man-head lions of Ashursirpolis will croak,
the last red-granite hand of the Colussus of Thebes
will drop off, the Indian supergod Harikaru
will cover his onyx eyes, the Rhind mathematical
scrolls
will catch fire, the suspended Zen poems will
evaporate,
and the green hellish judge from the Ming dynasty
will whine.

For the time of stone is meted out
and so is the time of myth.

Only genes are eternal,
from body to body,
from one breed to another breed,
on Southampton Row
in fact
you will find walking genetic codes of Egyptian mummies,
deoxyribonucleic acid of the man from Lindow,
whose bodily receptacle, cut in half by a bulldozer,
successfully swells under a glass bell,
in Bloomsbury, in fact, you find
all the eternity of the world rushing around
buying black flowers
for the Last Judgment, less Last
than a midnight hotdog.

So the British Museum is not to be found
in the British Museum

The British Museum is in us,
quite in the middle,
quite at the bottom.