There was murder in the kiva
They’d been diggin’ for five days;
The sherds were non-existent,
But the crew was drawin’ pay,
Till the boss came back from Boulder
Where he’d been a day or two;
He looked into his favorite trench –
And there he found Magoo*.
The boss looked down in anger,
He said it wouldn’t do,
“You’ll never get anywhere
Diggin’ with this here Magoo!”
Then right before his eyes
A shovel-full sailed through the air
And landed on the back-dirt pile
That was a-settin’ there.
Magoo himself had just revealed
Before the angry man,
One hundred-sixty inches down,
A rusty old tin can!
A silence fell upon the crew,
They looked up at their boss,
But he wasn’t sayin’ anything,
His eyes took on a gloss.
There was murder in the kiva,
But no one ever knew;
The boss himself, quite silently,
Just buried old Magoo.
*Al Lancaster, former Mesa Verde chief archeologist’s term for a grey-clay sterile soil found beneath any known living layer in the park’s stratigraphic soil layers.
