A Celtic Skull in the Museum at La Tène

Two-thousand years and more untouched I burned
In soil’s slow fire. On the beach
Above, ringed by thin, withered trees, the sky
Rang with the haunted shore bird’s screech.

The water’s face can make a door, and so
They bound my arms with fur, cut off my head,
Dropped me on cold and stony shore. Still young,
I was an offering to gods now dead

Themselves and silent through these many years.
The druids uttered words to lightly brush
The distant ears of gods. I bled the lake’s
White margins dark. Then came the weighted hush.

They caught me with a trowel and dusting brush
And pulled me softly from the earth’s brown sleep
To sit behind museum glass and glare,
Jawless and silent in the glass cube keep.