And hey, I got a finished poem out of it! 'For once then, something' :)
Remnants
My personal footprint in history is likely
to be light.
All my most loved things have
been someone else’s in their time. I’m
just their latest keeper.
And will anyone be able to sense the thin
strata of self I leave behind on
second hand books and vintage hand-me
-downs? Will someone else see the beauty in these
poor man’s object d’art, this ephemera that will mean
nothing to those not me?
Perhaps I will, somehow, deposit
a few molecules of my joy onto
these copies of Durrell. Mayhap a
hollow echo of wonder will ring
from the cracked pages of Holub, of
Beckett, Wyndham or Oliver.
Surely the pleasure I took from it
will add to the patina of this bowl filled with
pebbles, turned quarter profile
to the light, sun motes of dust
dancing on its rim?
Someone, I am sure, will desire these sunglasses;
round and delicate, from the era of flappers, of
waved hair and waved morals. Someone will,
like me, question what’s been seen
through that dark glass and maybe their
careful fingers on time-cracked, tortoiseshell
plastic will feel the ghosts of mine
under their tips.
But my individual relics will be few. I will
leave no fossils in my wake. I will be
the pigment in the slate, the faint
shadow taint of blurring
in the outline of the landscape, signalling
some barrow of the long dead.
It will be my absence that tells you I was there.
