Underneath
the dark tent
covering
your head
you
squinted
clumsy
in that heat
into
the brown box
that
peered into the past
as
sands whipped across you.
The
stiff dryness of Giza
threatened
those wet plates of early film
as
they fizzed
bubbling
over glass.
You
gazed ahead toward feats of
buried
peoples
headstones
worthy of the pharaoh,
graves
further entombed.
Adjusting
you
waited.
Adjusting,
you
remained.
A
sunken scentless guardian
as
your foreground,
burnt in golden sepias
in the same sands
until well after you rest.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Matt Whitman is currently a graduate student at The University of Alabama. He is 22.
Bay Laurel / Volume 1, Issue 1 / Autumn 2012