Richard III: Back From the Grave

image borrowed from bing

Richard III; Back From the Grave

“An honest tale speeds best, being

plainly told.”--William Shakespeare

We do not know his full name,

this much maligned monarch,

slain by Henry Tudor’s smaller forces

on August 22, 1485 at the Battle

of Bosworth Field; unhorsed, no helmet,

he faced the pikes & swords alone,

losing the decisive battle of the

War of the Roses,

and it was written that his corpse was mistreated,

stripped naked, sustaining several humiliation

injuries, then buried in a small narrow grave,

legs broken, hands tied behind his back, with

no RIP for this crumpled corpse;

yet now his skeletal remains have been unearthed

beneath an English Car Park in Leicester, found

among the ruins of Greyfriars friary, after five

troubled centuries, despite historical rumors

that his body had been dug up several hundred

years before & dumped in a nearby river, 

after years of constant demolition & rebuilding,

after the monarch’s grave had been lost to history,

his skeleton has returned, found mere inches

from old brick foundations,

and the bones tell a tale of violent death,

10 wounds, 8 to the head, 2 to the body,

and that he had suffered with a round worm

infection, and had a severe case of scoliosis,

perhaps debunking the idea he was a hunchback.

They found a descendent of the House of York,

compared the DNA, and it was an exact match,

before setting into motion heated arguments

over the royal remains--should he be re-buried

with a state funeral at Westminster Abbey?

No, it was decided that the king would be

reinterred at Leicester Cathedral, close to

where he died in battle, one of the very few

English monarchs to do so on British soil.

Perhaps now the history books will be

rewritten & corrected as the bone shards

of truth spoke clearly, as many 15th Century

Tudorists have become restless in their

own graves, still clinging with dead fingers

to their politically-perverted biased

version of his colorful reign. 

Glenn Buttkus

September 2013

Posted over on dVerse Poets FFA

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