Kennewick Elegy
A new poem about the famous skeleton by Amit Majmudar
He launched his body’s burnished bone spears
beyond the race to a point beyond despair,
what broke in him, broken open, like a spore.
Prior to everything but pang and prayer,
he watches us inside a stillness freer
than all the speed that harries us through the air.
His mind unknowable, his face unknown,
the part that lasts was in between them: Bones
that die hard let us know him for our own.
His rise is a promise we will not go under
the jackhammer rain or river’s power sander
but take more killing than a death can render
because we are the pearl and pit of matter,
infinite mind in a rind of dura mater
the hardest thing that matter ever mothered,
our historiography of wounds
graven deeper than the flighty winds
that make a rubbing of our eloquence.