Sutton Hoo

by Bex Hainsworth

For Mercie Lack and Barbara Wagstaff

Summer, 1939, and the past is pressing itself
against windowpanes like the children
in your classes when the planes fly overhead.
Gas masks clunk in cardboard, there is
a parade of plague doctors in the playground.
Time doesn’t feel linear: it folds like an accordion,
like the earth beneath a plough. 

You are holidaying in Suffolk, not far
from where mounds rise from the wheat,
the humps of a sea serpent, and the sun
is a single coin in a burning trove of sky.
It is a graveyard without cold stone,
crisping in August heat. The digging
begins. There is something primal, urgent,
about our need to reach into the earth.
We are midwives, we are moles,
daring something to reach back.

The ship appears slowly, an eye
blinking open to a world it hasn’t seen
for over a thousand years. The afterlife
is fresh and green. The wood is a memory,
its shadow left in the soil like a ghost,
but iron rivets curve into elbows, arc into ribs
and hips. Birds are trilling funeral hymns,
delivering a eulogy a millennium in the making.

Peggy, in muddy dungarees, strikes gold.
At twenty-seven, she has the surgical precision
of centuries as she slides into the belly of the boat
for that first flash of treasure. A stream
of glittering relics follow: a bowl, a belt buckle,
a shroud of armour, and a sword extracted
like a splinter. They are held up to Edith,
to the light. The bow of her smile tilts in approval. 

You both captured it all, each frame
its own hoard, preserving history whilst
being lost to it. And yet the photos
are the proof of your existence,
your gifts of immortality.

Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Wales, The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, Nimrod, and The Rialto. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press.