Baby Jane Doe

- Reminiscences of working in a Crime Lab –

-          Cape Town 1979 –

There once was a woman

With peppercorn hair

Lying on the mortuary slab

Her bones were broken

Her skull was crushed

Her skin a jaundiced-brown

Old and careworn she looked;

For she’d led a miserable life

Yet now

On her face

A serene look of acceptance

We had to cut her open;

We had to see

Who’d committed this evil deed

The last I saw before I fainted;

The coroner holding a tiny girl

She was perfect;

Ten little toes and fingers

On delicate hands and feet

A child should be born

In the loving warmth

Of a maternity ward

The air sweet

 With baby powder and mothers milk

Not in the ice cold

Coldness of a morgue

Where the air is thick,

So sick

With smells of

Death and formalin

To the killer

This woman’s life was worthless

Dead or alive;

It was all the same

But this baby girl,

She,

Who was born

Dead in a morgue

She,

Never even had a name