Out loud they cry, when they come back above ground,
A cheerful judder, then the chattering jaws -
Chorus of teacups clattering on a tray -
Barefoot, with the worms and roots still on them,
The puddles cool between their metatarsals.
Sunrise and shadow light sweep through their ribbing.

Seeing how they can be, again articulated,
Human as bones are when vertical and jaunty,
His heart is moved: how beautiful, he says,
And grasps then what it must mean to be human
Returning rested from the afterlife
Into the lovely dew of resurrection.

The skulls howl out their joy, and all are grinning,
Popping their knuckles, counting their vertebrae,
And now they dance alone and now join hands,
And as they dance there, in their ribs and rigging
In each grey skeleton a robin perches
Plumping its feathers, pulsing out its song

Red, and their twittering is blood and music.
- Never has he witnessed a scene so vital,
The dance of life the scripture guaranteed.
Faster as shadows shorten and noon rises
The skeletons spin and conga into the air
Making a cloud, a halo on the sun.

He takes his spade and sets it on his shoulder.
He's old. Until now he has known regret.
He's buried his grandparents and his parents,
His kings and queens, his brothers and his friends,
His lovers, all of them, the flesh turned food
And nothing, the bone bearing

In its chalk wholeness so much love and light.
From his own graveyard, with the dead departed,
One unfamiliar skeleton stands up
Tall, gracious, folding his fingers over
Two holes, and where his hurt feet strike on stone
Sparks from the rusty nails, and in his side

A spear, perch for a phoenix. Jesus Christ
Risen in this garden, and the wounds,
Or the bones that keep the marks of wounds are singing.
It's noon, there are no shadows. This is true.
He raised them and himself is rising up.
The place is empty now, the judgement over.

Later in the day the Prince arrives,
Stepping from his book as from a carriage
Drawn up among the holes in which the dead
Waited, and from which they are all flown.
Anxious, a bit deranged, he finds occasion
To hold a conversation with a skull.

Is it a skull or a stone that looks like a skull?
The heads are all gone to heaven, Jesus too,
Even the sexton put off his flesh and followed,
Ophelia was already on her star.
Poor prince, alone with just a book of ballads,
With just his plot nothing can save him from.