A Powder Blue Beetle

A Powder Blue Beetle

Cracked desert sand and a powder green beetle.
Like a code or hidden message in inky black calligraphy.
Now on display, when before there was no witness
to the death of a king, a boy, with a bloody drop of poison.
An unmoving face, with a mask of death trimmed with rays of aquamarine.
Trapped, locked away between four walls, museum.

A history prison and an antiquity zoo, they call him museum.
Mull about slowly; make your way through the desert as an ancient beetle.
Always up ahead like a shining diamond, a cool bead of aquamarine.
The snakes skip sideways in the fiery dunes of sand, writing their own calligraphy,
trying to escape capture from those who desire their glossy pearls of poison.
The sun sits high and watches, the Sand Sea’s only witness.

Smirking crocodiles sunk low in their soggy silt and watched like a silent witness
as they took him away to be viewed by wide eyed children, in a museum.
They would read many myths about how he had passed, all of it fictitious poison.
“Give no false evidence,” commanded the heart shaped beetle.
They etched their commandments on the dusty limestone walls in chipped calligraphy
So that the rain could not wash it away with it’s drops of aquamarine.

They were promised everlasting happiness and youth in the form of aquamarine, keeping them safe from Ammit and his witness
who records justice done in elegant calligraphy.
His records, faded with time, now lie in a stone museum,
Protected by glass as Khepera pushes the sun high in the sky, like dung pushed by a beetle.
The sharp rays are corrosive, like a poison.

Many of the items have been lost to men and their thieving poison,
Created from a desire for fame and diamonds in every shade of aquamarine.
Amulets to ward off evil were thrown aside as worthless beetles,
only ever able to witness.
Silent, like the inside of a museum
Where signs command Do Not Touch in rigid calligraphy.

Once called hieroglyphics, now calligraphy.
Lost to modern time poison.
Now sitting, obsolete, in a museum.
A glimpse of aquamarine
draws in many to witness
a culture past, leaving behind fragments of history and a powder green beetle.