Beautiful Bones

If it were possible,
if by some miracle his bones were found,
how would they look?

Would they be soft and white?
The colour and consistency of mud?
What does water do to bones?

They wouldn’t have lain
where they had been so carelessly tossed
by the treacherous rabble who called themselves Englishmen.

They would have drifted,
been pulled along by an undertow
to some unknowable destination.

At first after the infamy of his death,
he had rested briefly beneath marble and alabaster
at Greyfriars in Leicester.

Then during the Dissolution of the Monasteries
his poor desecrated body was torn
from its resting place, and cast into the River Soar

If they could be looked upon,
only beautiful bones would be revealed;
for it was Holbein’s brush, Shakespeare’s pen
and Tudor lies that deformed him.