by Nick Swarbrick
A manuscript of prayers, lists of the tourist spots
With best indulgences, comfortable inns
A book no longer needed, catalogued.
Into uselessness, no officers detaining it
A simple lack of use its sentence
Who swept up the glass when the puritans left?
Who bending down saw faces on the stones,
Parts of faces, robes, dismembered blessings,
Cut a finger perhaps, swore as they sucked
a sparkle of bright blood?
Incipits of lost poems,
Manuscripts of lists no longer useful.
The mind’s wallpaper
Scrumpled and binned.
Such are the shopping lists of past things
The worn celebrations whose words are forgotten
The lovely saints detained in an unreal past
They have gone, they have all gone down
Into the dark cellar where everything is shadow
Into the watermark of blank pages
Memory (or is it belief?) swears to itself
And is hustled swiftly and without ceremony
Out into the night’s arrest
