Cannibal
I read about the Anasazi
being cannibals
and saw the catalog
of human remains.
The skulls that had been
roasted face up
in the hearth.
The bones that had
been broken to extract
the marrow
and had marks of
"pot polish"
where they hit the clay
cooking vessel
being boiled.
The description of the sites
where the bones were littered;
a whole family, grandparents
teenaged children,
infant,
left as bone trash.
A turd crapped out
in the fire
for terror.
The eight hundred and fifty year old
shit being the only certain proof of
cannibalism.
Human remains
in human excrement.
The Anasazi culture disappeared
suddenly around 1150.
Scientists, denying cannibalism,
could not understand why.
I read this in the New Yorker magazine.
Browsing through another literary magazine, Granta,
I saw a picture of 7,000 kilograms of
women’s hair, Auschwitz,
next to a stark photograph of two sturdy crematoria
in a clean cement room.
I saw a classroom floor taken over with skeletons and their clothes
in Rwanda.
I saw Vietnamese infant
victims of Agent Orange
in formaldehyde jars,
and the arrangement
of skulls in a grid
continuing far beyond the photograph’s edge
from Cambodia.
I have been thinking about the
Anasazi and described their cannibalism
at Thanksgiving dinner, yesterday, inappropriately.
I needed to talk about it.
I do not believe in the religion of
Vegetarianism.
as if we humans could be better than wolves
and might disdain meat.
My love,
I am an old
mess of flesh
and pumping blood.
My blood still runs.
I come to you
to offer you
my self
stripped.
I need this image of Christ.
My molested body and His.
The wafer and the sweet bitter wine
we imbibe to know Him
in ourselves
bleeding on the cross.
What we did to Him,
how we betrayed Him,
how He suffered
and was still God
still Good
human good.
What is killed
and what yet grows.
Somehow to believe
in love,
know love,
and still not deny
what was wasted
and lies violated
within me,
around me,
by me.
Penelope Hyde
11.28.98
