Two poems about the desert and its funny ways.
I.
The desert remembers
Thinks the mummy, head bowed in eternal agreement.
Its desiccated body has hardened against the heat
The dry heat
that turns all skin to leather.
Here, at the museum
it wonders about the Nile’s humid shores
Fertile moisture, wet
It would shudder if it could
The mummy knows only
the humid heat and
the dry heat
Just as the latter keeps its flesh intact over millennia
The former accelerates decay in all its forms.
It would be funny, I think
to shove a pickled bog man
in the mummy’s sarcophagus.
So many confused archaeologists!
II.
I feel it underneath my body
hot and scratchy
against my skin.
My hands
raspy and dry,
fingers devoid of feeling.
I drown in heat, I die of thirst.
I leave behind
an imprint on the sand.
I leave.