Bad Poetry: Bones

Prompted by the Poets & Storytellers United. Content warning: bones, decomposition rate of. 

In a damp and fertile land

things don't always go as planned.

Mrs. Johnson finally got

a permit to use a plot

on the farm, as fit she found,

for a family burial ground;

hired men to find, exhume

from a marketable room

in a larger cemetery,

her son's coffin, with his bones.

Of the job they were not wary.

Protestants expect no moans

from a soundly sleeping spirit

looking forward to inherit

mansion in eternal bliss.

But they weren't expecting this:

though they dug up the whole plot,

six by six by six, found not

one board of the coffin there,

nor a skeleton, nor hair,

but one little blackened bone,

moldering fast away, alone

where it must have lain between

where the hands and ribs had been.

Just one finger joint remained!

All the rest Nature had gained.

Rich, fresh, loamy was the soil,

just a hint of black like oil

stained where body had been laid.

For one finger they were paid;

carried to his father's land,

buried as his mother planned.