A to-do list is the last place you would expect to find a funeral. Dave Bonta's "Things to do with human bones in the Neolithic" borrows the flat, practical shape of a checklist and fills it with jobs that come across as shocking, tender and faintly comic by turns. Thirteen lines give thirteen instructions, nearly all opening on a bare command: deflesh, gather, feed, dig, build, break, burn. The poem is about how the living deal with the dead, and its central idea is that this relationship is never settled. The bones are to be feared and fed, kept close and kept at a distance.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Each line is a single end-stopped sentence, so the poem moves like a series of deliberate actions, one hand movement after another. The pronoun "them" lands at or near the end of line after line, a steady drumbeat that keeps the bones as the grammatical object of everything. The living are barely present, hiding in the unspoken "you" of each command. Line length does quiet work too. "Feed them beer." is only three words, blunt and oddly affectionate, while the closing lines stretch out into long, clause-heavy sentences, as if the ritual grows more elaborate the longer it goes on.
The poem's logic runs on small purpose clauses introduced by "so". Ditches are dug "so the uninitiated cannot get too close"; mounds are built "so the otherworld can ascend"; stones are raised "so they will remember us." The most striking moment comes with the pair of lines about dreams. "Break them so they will not follow us in our dreams." is followed at once by "Suck out the marrow so their spirits will protect us in our dreams." The phrase repeats, the grammar mirrors itself, and the acts are almost the same, but the hopes are opposite. The dead are dangerous and protective at once, and the poem refuses to choose.
The imagery moves from soft to hard, from flesh to architecture. It begins with knives, wolves and ravens stripping the body, then skin bags, a hearth, ditches, mounds, clay jars and finally a ring of standing stones. The bones are enclosed in ever larger structures, as though the living are gradually building a home for their grief. Some images fold the domestic into the sacred. Burying bones "under the hearth" puts the dead beneath the family fire, and digging them up "every fall" to dance with them gives death the rhythm of a harvest. The poem's only explicit simile is its most haunting: the jars are decorated with "rows of pits, as from missing teeth." The container of ash takes on a gap-toothed mouth, and the urn becomes a face.
Then there is the voice. "Organize them by size and type" sounds like a museum cataloguer, and "mash-up ancestors" is pure modern slang. These anachronisms look deliberate. Judging by the details, the poem draws on the picture archaeologists piece together from sorted and mingled remains, and it points out that we still do something similar. We rearrange our ancestors into new versions of themselves through stories, family legends and exhibitions. The distant past stops being a sealed-off other world and becomes a mirror.
The last line turns the whole poem around. After twelve lines of the living acting on the dead, the final hope is about being remembered: the stones stand "so they will remember us who stand in the light." The phrase "in the light" makes the living look brief and exposed, and the circle of stone outlasts them. All the fear, feeding and breaking seem to come from one wish, to matter to those who came before and to those who will come after.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It makes prehistory feel close without explaining it, and it lets humour and awe sit side by side. Because it is a list, it leaves the gaps between instructions for the reader to fill, and what fills them is the uneasy tenderness of people who cannot quite let their dead go.