‘ CROUCHED BURIAL’ BY UNA MANNION

They move the earth with small trowels and brushes and

all week the seals sing a desolate chorus as if for you. First a small child’s foot slow sweeps of the brush across your small bones,

your shape in the ditch, taking definition, a slow birth

in the corner of the field by the water’s edge. You are lying on your side knees pulled into your chest the thin bones of your arms holding yourself without your hands

your heavy head bent low toward your small body, a comma in the earth, like an ultra sound picture of the earth’s womb

where you lay crouched for years.

Beside your ribcage, a single blue glass bead for your ear a bronze ring, your grave gifts. If flowers and herbs cradled your head, they are dust now. Someone brought you here and laid you down with care your death a secret, your story buried. In the moon bay at the edge of earth where they found you

the midden’s shelves layer time, like growth rings.

Now is our turn on the surface of time

you and your buried bead, prehistory,

before there were written words to remember with.

A sequence of milk teeth along the bone of your jaw and

the buds to permanent ones spell your age.

You are eighteen months old.

Your bones in the midden are a mystery

Iron Age people didn’t bury their dead

bodies were left to wind, or wolves or water. But not you. Perhaps touching your cold cheek your mother

could not abandon your body to the night

and here, where the land juts out toward the sea and the tide moves, a place she might find again, she brought you.