The Mutineer.
They stumbled upon him
fumbling for lost finds
like determined children
searching for flopping worms
and grubs that they so fear;
a pale skull, divorced shamelessly
from collum and mandible,
left to rest aside a spine
of wrought withered wood,
beside brothers in defiance and revolt.
And why was his bored palms,
scattered around the site?
A vague, half desecration,
to salt a dead wound?
Why did his poor skull,
sport an unnatural blunt orifice
housed now by unturned black sod?
Still, reporters flocked across the aegean
like cold eels to the sargasso,
to gaze and narrate; judge and behold
the mutineer, who lost his life;
a promise on the heavy back
of deeds long done.
So cold was the sword to his throat,
discovered some weeks later,
by an aged toothless, grinning herdsman,
little more than arms length,
master forged, in-cripted yet without hilt
and so true were his now blanched remains,
within the black blanket of the earth,
laying rested beneath the dotted chalk
like a stubborn elder, despising the heavy
Sun.