I wonder how the pharaohs feel
knowing that their tombs are wrecked.
I wonder if they need their things, now catalogued and shuffled off.
Isn’t that why they put them there, their ushabti statuettes,
their comfortable chairs,
to help them in the afterlife?
I wonder if they like museums.
If I will look so good myself
three-thousand years from now.
How well will I hold up?
Will my satin pillow be intact?
Will my three-piece suit still exist
for scientists to comment on, and unwrap?
Will they stand me up behind some glass
and mount a small explanatory plaque?
My tomb will have no schistose statuettes of gods
or of myself, no crocodiles in black granite, no
soapstone scarabs, no chamber walls painted with
banquet scenes, red and yellow ochre, ground
malachite for green, azurite for blue. No plates
of funerary food, no jugs of wine, no rooms of
furniture, no necessary tools or terra cotta lovers,
no wooden soldiers or attendants, no gold and lapis
sarcophagi hidden in a pyramid that eclipses the sun
at fifty stories. No two-and-a-half million white
limestone blocks weighing five-thousand pounds
apiece covering a chamber shorn from fifty-ton
granite monoliths dug and carried from an Aswan
quarry six-hundred miles away. No Book of the Dead
or shields or weapons to protect me.
My tomb will be a field of stones.
