The British Museum

According to the rules of the fugue,
any ark
will be ruined
once, the trilingual
Rosetta Stone will be broken, stelae of Halicarnassus
will turn to dust, sandstone Assyrian spirits
with eagle heads will shyly take off,
the carved man-head lions of Ashur will croak,
the last red-granite hand of the Colossus of Thebes
will drop off, the Indian supergod Harikaru
will cover his onyx eyes, the mathematical scrolls
will catch fire, the pendant Zen poems will evaporate,
and the green hellish judge from the Ming dynasty will whine.

For the time of stone is meted out
and so is the time of myth

Only genes are eternal,
from body to body,
from one breed to another breed,
on Southampton Row
in fact
you find walking genetic codes of Egyptian mummies,
deoxyribonucleic acid of the man from Gebelin,
hereditary traits of the man from Lindow,
whose earthly remains, cut in half by a bulldozer,
successfully swell under a glass bell,
in Bloomsbury, in fact, you find
all the eternity of the world rushing around
buying black flowers
for the Last Judgment, less Last
than a midnight hotdog.

So the British Museum is not to be found
in the British Museum

The British Museum is in us,
in our very hearts,
in our very depths.

by Miroslav Holub

Taken from The Rampage, published by Faber & Faber.