Catacombs At Palermo (Poetry)

Permanently shelved, death stacks them row on row —
gone empty headed, gargoyle-faced, their faded clothes on show
to tourists traipsing through their dust, no sterile waxworks these
but corpses thickening the air with hypnotic unease.

They leer, they stare, they poke long-rotted phantom tongues
at those who dare disturb their rest — the nervous peeping toms
who cough and giggle in the gloom, shiver in that chill
and glimpse their own mortality, get a ghost train thrill

from skulls with wispy strands of hair and desiccated skin,
dark sockets echoing the mood — half comical, half grim,
and those who can’t resist the urge to touch what now remains,
confuse mere curiosity with something they can’t name.

These lolling bones are all too real — the proof of what’s to come,
and fingering the evidence confirms our fate since none
can contradict the truth preserved inside these crumbling walls
as, for a moment, death displays a vision that appalls

yet fascinates. The living squirm and shudder at the dead,
then shuffle down the corridor back to the street and shed
attendant shadows, damp with fear, dismiss with anxious laughs
the lesson that unnerves our flesh and haunts us with the past.