After-life

Wings flash – heron, ibis, blue-throats,
coots – past clouds of bog-flies and dangling-legged mosquitoes.
A fish wriggles in a sharp beak. Teeth sunk
in flexed feathers, a wild-cat leaps.
Pharoah too is hunting.
 
                                         It is this
old tomb painting which floods His delta-mind
when the Lord wakes with a dust-dry mouth.
Remembering too Friday afternoons, how the fishermen
and farmers sat in the shade telling stories,
before ram-headed Khnum closed
the flood-gates and the genie escaped from
his bottle waving a sword. The Lord
sees the land is dry, and that all have died who
in their nostrils was the breath of life.
 
On that parched day the Lord hisses
for a fly in the uttermost part of Mesopotamia,
and a bee in the land of Assyria
and calls a scavenger-beetle up
from the mud of the Nile.
 

Margaret Wilmot

published in Scintilla 26, 2023