SUTTON HOO SEQUENCE Copyright © Cameron Hawke Smith 2010

I therefore regard a ship burial as just as much a poem as Beowulf..
Martin Carver, Sutton Hoo, 1998. p.173

1

Not the obvious place
for a ship
if it was meant to travel –
a mound on a hill of gravel.

Well?

Was archaeopteryx aiming to fly
when it hopped a little
and hung there
in the suddenly solid air?

Either way, it reached us.

2

We all make hoards

thirty-seven gold coins
from thirty-seven
Merovingian mints, a scramasax
baptismal spoons

a coronation mug
six unused trout flies
a Brownie camera
a stick of chalk

Poet, archaeologist,
make up some stories.

3

A hundred iron strands
twisted tight and welded,
wrapped like a pupa,

seeming dead
it was lethal in the hand.

Red garnets, blue glass
and ivory, a fistful
of butterflies
around the blazing steel.

4

The bodies are just the earth's
idea of bodies. They heave into
anagrams of resurrection.

Said to be gallows folk,
they populate
this shoreline Golgotha,
grotesqueries
in a recovered codex.

5

The old man leant
his Christened ear to the wall
of the mound, he recalled
the roystering of warrior kings:

he heard the drip,
drip of rainwater
eroding the great
bronze cauldron,
the creak

of decaying timbers,
the snap
of a lyre string as the gut
failed.