Sacrifice

On Grauballe Man at Möesgard Prehistoric Museum
The Iron Age man lay slightly aslant in the peat, with the head and upper part of the body raised … The puckered forehead, the eyes, the throat and the twisted posture all express [pain and terror] … [He] lay with his throat cut, the sign of a ceremony in which the sacrificial blood had to well out in a stream to the gods whom it was desired to honour.
P.V. Glob, The Bog People
Water and earth
your keepers,
their weight and drift
slanting the body
clenched inside
its labyrinth of nerves
as the blade
half-mooned
the neck.
In other lit cases,
tableaux of figures
show how you hunted,
placated gods,
would have been buried
after a natural death.
Who or what lived
because you died?
Who or what needed
your death?
In such a glass shell,
Stalin, blandly immutable,
so it seemed,
once lay:
the god of sacrifice
cunningly non-committal
in his own demise,
a mask of white shadow
now dissolving
as the soft lighting
changes to a glare,
the air-conditioning
begins to pulsate
erratically…
mud, after all,
a greater preserver
than any myth of power.
Clasped and carried
as if by a long slow wave,
this man lies stranded
on heaped dry earth:
the victim as perfect
witness to the crime —
still recoiling,
still uttering
from the slit throat
a severed scream.