Suspended on wire hoops as though ensnared – 
the very centre of the display case. 
One tentacles your hip-swoops and another  
scoops at your block neck where the crosshatched stump 
of your head tips forward as still asleep 
or in the strangeness of exhumation. 
How eerie to think that from millennia 
silt-interred, seven Tutankhamuns’s dead years, 
this patch of museum light has snatched you still.  
 
I circumambulated you, bowed in basement  
hush, the dark room your very own, to peer  
properly at your tiny heft, at your pied 
grey trunk, all tabs and divots; campanulate 
thighs, twin inguinal eyelids furcular; 
at your small back cloven and dug out. To think  
once someone impossibly past prodded you  
to poise, face drawn close to that orphan chalk 
until you woke from it: miniature mother. 
First, a flash of palms and urgent fingers, 
one moment being handled all the time, 
then twenty thousand years of buried sleep.