When they made a scarecrow Pharaoh
I no longer really cared,
Though the smile cut in his pumpkin head
Was already turning mushy,
The straw stuffing his rich, bejewelled robes
Was sodden with the damp it soaked up
From the flooded throne room floor
And when they tried to move him
Dead mice fell by the dozen from his golden cuffs.
And the seeds of rye that padded out
His fat pharaonic arse
Became peppered with a bloom of ergot
Which sent spoors into the granaries
Borne by the gritty winds
Thereafter sending the whole Middle Kingdom
Mad.
But I found it hard to feel a thing beyond
A begrudging sort of boredom.
That said, after the termites ate the
Heka and Nekhakha
The courtiers bodged to give Pharaoh a backbone
To prop his scarecrow corpse up
And he folded and collapsed
In dust and compost,
I might have then half smiled.
For at that very instant
a murder of crows flew in from roosts beyond the Sphinx
and with a certain irony
Built nests amidst the wreckage.