Comp. 3392 invited you to write ‘The Curse of King Thut’ (in poetry or prose) in response to the discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Thutmose II, the first such since Tutankhamun’s. There were many imaginative curses, from the archaeologist Artemis Spendlove Jr’s tinnitus (Mark Ambrose) to the contents of the tomb turning out quite meh (Frank Upton):
No treasure beyond measure
No ‘wonderful things’ in the Valley of Kings
No chaps in white suit and Panama
No mummy or daddy or granama
Mark Brown foretold of the influencers descending: ‘The mummy fumes beneath his wraps,/ As tourists pose for selfie snaps’ while Bill Greenwell promised a litany of afflictions (‘From your head down to your hallux, you’ll be impotent in Alex,/ While your nose will burst asunder up in Thebes’). In Janine Beacham’s poem, Thut’s curse is that he is doomed to be in the shadow of his more famous descendent: ‘But of the ancient kings I’ll never be the main celebrity,/ For Tutankhamun’s treasures put the asp in my asperity.’ Praise also to Jasmine Jones, Sylvia Fairley, Basil Ransome-Davies and Frank McDonald. The winners are below.
I’m Pharaoh Thutmose, and this is my tomb,
So you’d better push off or I’ll spell out your doom,
In which I shall call on our Egyptian gods
To come and sort out you inquisitive sods.
First I’ll send Bastet, who’s shaped like a cat,
She’ll rip up your curtains and pee on your mat,
And after her, dog-head Anubis will come,
Wait till you bend over, and then bite your bum.
Hathor will be the next part of your doom –
Do you want a huge cow in your living room?
Horus is hawk-headed – that isn’t a fable –
You don’t want to let him too near your bird-table!
I’ll also send Sobek, direct from the Nile,
Whose head, by the way, is a fierce crocodile.
And if you even think of unwrapping my mummy,
I’ll personally give you ten years’ gyppy tummy.
Brian Murdoch
For pharaohs in the pyramids, it’s tough:
You’re wrapped in spices, grittily embalmed,
And by a shaman priestess semi-charmed,
With chariots and spears and tawdry stuff.
Then after a millennium or two,
You start to hear the scratchings at the wall,
The gormless talk of ‘history overhaul’,
And worse, their Black and Deckers come in view.
Just how enthusiastic would they be
If I disturbed theirancestors of old,
And caused their rotting bodies to be sold,
While snapping off their leg bones at the knee?
Professors, diggers, diarists and all,
I’ll mar their lives and long to see them fall,
And from the new museum where I’m put,
I’ll wish on them the Curse of Great King Thut!
Nicholas Lee
To any rash fool who ever might dare
To end my long slumber, I say beware:
Bad things will come to you, bad and then worse,
Hearken ye now to the words of my curse:
Your boy child will grow to think he’s a lass
Your girl child’s skin will be covered with tats
Your best friend will run away with your wife
Family gatherings will bring only strife
Your allotment will grow nothing but slugs
You’ll have no money for your weight-loss drugs
The team you’ve supported for forty years
Will lose every match, with booing and jeers
AI will soon leave you out of a job
That gout in your toe will endlessly throb
Your regular pub will close down for good –
You’d reseal my tomb, if only you could.
Joseph Houlihan
You who come to disturb my rest, beware! Do not take even a pebble from my tomb, let alone my intestines from Qebehsenuef’s canopic jar. May you be miserable for eternity, but while you live that upstart Jehovah has given me a few ideas. The water in your well will turn to blood, there will be frogs in your bed, lice in your pubic hair, maggots in your crocodile kebabs. Your goats will be infected with something nasty, hailstones will smash your grapes, locusts will devour your millet, and you will be covered with boils the size of large scarabs. After that darkness will envelope the world for three days, and your children will turn pale and weedy. If you steal my shabti figures, which are there to serve me in the afterlife, may your own servants contract rabies and bite you. Death will follow on swift wings.
Elizabeth Kay
Embalmed and wrapped for eternity
By dozens of gentler hands,
I’ve been disinterred in modernity
Where you, from foreign lands,
Inquisitive and acquisitive,
Appear to be robbing my tomb.
However long dare you expect to live
Invading my sacred room?
Entwined betwixt bandage and unguent,
My Curse, long coiled, is thrown
At you who connive at a vile affront
To a Pharoah and his throne.
Cessation and cremation
Will expunge you from history:
Thutmose II will not suffer curation
By you who cannot leave be.
Adrian Fry
Disrupt eternal rest? Then feel my curse
that all you think you know will yet be worse.
You thought your lives were fixed, and all was sure:
but nothing’s safe and set-in-stone secure.
Your language slithers, robots rearrange
the messages you send and make them strange.
Your mind is in a Cloud, that Cloud grows thick.
You’ll struggle but there’s no way to unpick
this airy nothing, and the real world
slides out of touch, its signifiers furled.
Its passwords fail. Identities? – corrupt,
the cup of human pleasure rarely supped.
My story, carved in stone, will still survive
while you are floundering, only half-alive.
This is my curse on everything you planned.
Sealed, Thutmose the Second, by my hand.
D.A. Prince
No. 3395: Comrades
You are invited to rework Animal Farm as a satire of office politics (150 words maximum). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by 9 April. Apology: the closing dates for the past two comps were out by a week.
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