http://www.theage.com.au/world/king-richard-iiis-new-handcarved-coffin-20150322-1m4u0t.html
So Richard is finally being buried with dignity! An amazing story. After visiting Leicester last year, where his body had been found stuffed into a hole and subsequently covered over with a car park! – I wrote this poem. Sadly, wordpress does not seem to be overly respectful of indentations – but you’ll get the general idea:
After Bosworth Field
Richard III, the last Plantagenet King, was killed by the forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. His remains were identified beneath the site of the former Greyfriars in Leicester, 2013.
Too quickly
it comes to this:
a meagre scraping
into mud –
not long enough –
so that your outraged man’s body
stripped to skin and gape and clotted blood
half sits, half lies,
quite broken
on this final throne:
Vaunted trophy of that frantic field –
its wild viscera of axe and heavy sword
the sweated force of body slammed on human body –
then
an abject thing
discarded here,
tied wrists
falling
into the collapsing cradle of your lap,
black hair slimed and matted,
thick soil
silting –
sudden emptiness
of sockets;
Shiftings
in the musty dark:
a sedimentation of bone and mud,
metamorphosis of soil and time and
long forgetting;
the still far away ribbon
of day’s
thin and curious light.
roselucaspoetry 