Alois, awoken from your slumber
and lifted from the grave like precious jewels
your bones did taste the sun but once, unearthed
by friendly hands and bleached to canvas white.
The laurels wreathe your fractured skull, perhaps
insisted on by one who loved you. Did
the fossor paint those leaves? Your brow is marked
with name and year of death in careful script;
they did not wish for you to be forgotten.
Tempora mutantur. Today we hide
our dead, preserved but not to look upon
because we fear the fact of rot. But you,
resplendent in your painted wreath and placed
among the skulls of your forebears, proud
to be displayed, are prince of charnel crowned.
What I would give to take your skull in hand,
imagining skin pressed like clay to bone
fine features of a living face recalled.
What you would give to peel away at mine,
Revealing oleanders blooming white
The painted year as yet unknown to me.
RJ Aurand is a southern Appalachian writer, poet, and lover of the bizarre whose work has appeared in Blanket Gravity Magazine, Small Wonders, Solstitia, The Deadlands, and others. Connect on Bluesky @rjaurand.bsky.social or at rjaurand.com.
