UNISONActive is an unofficial blog produced by UNISON activists for UNISON activists. Bringing news, briefings and events from a progressive left perspective.

Sunday 19 September 2010

Untidiness by Amanda Dalton‏

The National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad

Some time after the looting, the locked gates,
the US tank stood idle in a gallery,

Mushin Hasan, his head bowed
in a room of shattered stone,

after some had come back in blankets,
dustbin bags, the boots of cars,

in pieces - the Bassetki Statue, pulled
from a cesspool, smeared with grease -

and others recovered from Jordan, Italy,
France, US, UK, Peru, eBay,

they re-opened the museum,

missing maybe 3 or 11,000
(depending what you read), missing

the Hatra Heads, the Nimrud Lioness,
and doubting they'll ever get them back,

those bits of the world,
bits of the civilised world, scattered.

• "Untidiness" is how the then secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, described the looting from the Iraq National Museum.

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