I’m searching for a small, cheap place to stay,
though, in a sense, all housing’s temporary,
even the grave. Robbers long ago
dug up and sold the mummy of the Great Pharoah,
who’s propped up, now, in the Egyptian Room
beside a reconstruction of his tomb.
But one day the museum’s Upkeep Trust
will dry up and he’ll turn to stinking dust.
Then he’ll be bagged and flung out with the trash
by janitors whose ancestors he lashed
to speed up work on his great pyramid.
“Finish it before I die!” They did.
It stands now as a granite monument
to a rich corpse, whose builders lived in tents.
:: Richard Cecil, in Green Mountains Review (2002)
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