History is a relentless master.
It has no present, only the past
rushing into the future
heat moved across the courtyard
crowds waiting drinking bottled water
and fanning themselves
until the museum opened
where we narrowed down
to a blast furnace of humanity
pushing inside and the dome
over the inner chamber
was glass-paned in diamonds
that blazed on the marble floors
crisscrossed like a lattice pie crust
and I’d forgotten that England
doesn’t invest in air conditioning
so it was hotter inside than out
a whole room of stone slabs cuneiform clay tablets
the fascinating variations of human writing
egyptian pictographs to petroglyphs
the art of words becoming texts
light was splitting across the circular staircases
like a shared migraine aura the voices of people
living and dead merging into noise
high-pitched distressed a siren
calling sailors onto the rocks or into a cave
suddenly the need for air sky so hot
in the packed room shaking with humanity
overwhelmed with the press of history
About the Author
Maureen Clark’s “This Insatiable August” was released by Signature Books in 2024 and won the Association of Mormon Letters Award for Best Poetry Book of 2024. Her memoir “Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl” is forthcoming by Hypatia Press on June 15, 2026. Her second poetry manuscript “A Country Without You” will be out in 2028 by BCC Press. She received her MFA from the University of Utah and taught there for 20 years.
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