Some time after the looting, the locked gates,
the US tank stood idle in a gallery,
Mushin Hasan, his head bowed
in a room of shattered stone,
after some had come back in blankets,
dustbin bags, the boots of cars,
in pieces - the Bassetki Statue, pulled
from a cesspool, smeared with grease -
and others recovered from Jordan, Italy,
France, US, UK, Peru, eBay,
they re-opened the museum,
missing maybe 3 or 11,000
(depending what you read), missing
the Hatra Heads, the Nimrud Lioness,
and doubting they'll ever get them back,
those bits of the world,
bits of the civilised world, scattered.
• "Untidiness" is how the then secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, described the looting from the Iraq National Museum.
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