People passing
on, wills read & in the end, all´s done & dusted,
Leaving loved
worldly goods, with worms & love, truly musted,
To greedy
daughters, errant sons & grasping fingers of eager kin,
Carted to
antique shops, auctioneers & often to the rubbish bins,
Tears shed
& history eaten by woodworm, moth, beetle & mould,
Escaping
grasping hands & memories, heirs don´t know how to hold.
Dusty, fusty
furniture, dresser, chair & old forgotten Victorian chest,
The old book,
manuscript & diary, the rose china, only Granny’s best,
Pushed into
forgotten webbed corners & left alone with lonely dust,
Old people´s
treasures, the silver whispering secret tales of sepia rust,
The
Chippendale, the Turner, the painting & the ancient Gothic scroll,
The cabinet,
the trunk, Grandfather´s war medals & the old Ming bowl.
Walnut, oak
& mahogany, aged silk & the treasures of forgotten old lives,
The curlicued
corners, trodden Persian carpets, & those old Toledan knives,
Unpolished
suits of sleeping armour & adorned sconces of Gargoyled grins,
Fading
tapestries relating old legends, now unraveling & so sadly unpinned,
Family history´s
past & by waiting inheritors, old lives now unfairly forgotten,
Fading wood,
paint & in hand-stitched memories of old wool, silk & soft cotton.
Faded sepia
photographs of a long-gone, forgotten, but vaguely familiar face,
Distorted old
mirrors, where shadows dance by in haunting & yellowing lace,
Fraying
fabrics kissed on delicate gloved hands, by the lips of long dead time,
Noble metals
now hidden & deep asleep by the slumbering veneer of grime,
The haunting
voices echoing through the lost halls of long-ago past histories,
All those
antique memories gone, now leaving behind lives & untold mysteries.
Not only
furniture, & family treasures age & get old, an antiquity too now am I,
An antique of
aching arthritic limb, lost confused mind & of milky rheumy eye,
It is of no
matter to anyone, of my history, nor all my old stories & tales to tell,
I´m destined,
as the beetle, the wood-lice & moth, to go to heaven or maybe hell,
It all depends
on the final lot & on the last bang of the auctioneer´s wooden gavel,
Whether my soul
is turned to shining gold, or simply turned to mere stony gravel,
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