The Hanney Brooch

The Hanney Brooch

 

The earth is a deep red womb.

They lie her back in it, arms limp

At her sides. Perhaps there is a wound,

Or a blench of disease, a bluing lip,

 

And beautiful eyes already sinking

In her skull, which will cave in

With the weight of loam. A spindle

Is wrapped in lifeless fingers.

 

There are glazed pots, jars of glass

And a useful knife. Fertile soil

Clogs her ears, enters her sagging

Mouth. Ground waters leach and spoil

 

Her braided hair. And when she is reborn

Into air, the brooch that held her cloak

Glints with garnets. The old brown

Dust clogs the cloisons in their concentric

 

Rings of gold. A boss of cuttlefish bone

Gleams white amongst the mould,

The foil and filigree broken

By the plough. All that heart and mind

 

Waiting among the worms and mud

To be shovelled up: she was twenty-five.

Will she spin again? Will some smith mend

The gildings, some god make her alive?

 

 

Poem by Giles Watson, 2012. The Hanney brooch was found in 2009 amongst the remains of a female aged around twenty-five years in a field near West Hanney, Oxfordshire. It is now housed in the Vale and Downland Museum, Wantage. Its owner lived in the seventh century, and was possibly a high-ranking member of the local Saxon Gewisse tribe. Whilst the pattern on her brooch is cruciform, and conforms to the height of Christian Anglo-Saxon fashion, her mourners also followed the more pagan custom of inhuming a range of other, more useful burial goods alongside her body.

 

Done