Poetry workshop

Had a go at the Guardian's poetry workshop for the first time, which was an interesting exercise: Jo Bell asking us to consider what will survive of us in 'Digging deep: personal archaeologies'. I'm not sure I'd say I'm 100% satisfied with the result but reasonably happy at least; there's a line or two I'm quite pleased with.

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.