A sunny holiday.
And you explore
The Mattanchery Dutch Palace.
Medival charm, as the tourist-brochures say.
Portrait galleries, bed-chambers of dead kings
(That somehow make you blush, or feel so coy)
And a unique slippery-as-marble Kerala flooring
Made of burned coconut shells, plants, egg-whites.
You have only learnt
To look from the outside.
The guide takes you to a museum on the
ground floor
To show you sylish chariots and
grandiose palanquins
And large clay urns where they buried the dead.
Suspended from the ceiling
Is a lifesize cast-iron cage in human shape
(About six-foot-high, rusted, with footholds)
To be put in the market place
With a criminal strapped in.
Ancient torture device
That lets a man die of immobility
Only his eyes could move.
His mind could race all the time.
You come away
You have learnt what a condemned
dying man could see.
