Times Literary Supplement Poem by Ernest Hilbert

We sifted through his room at the museum,
Opened it like a tomb; sorted, emptied,
Claimed its small treasures: coins, copper sculptures,
Maps of an Augustan mausoleum,
Tripods, stalled watches, stiff river reed,
Nicked reading glasses, vivid fishing lures.
Stubbornly, the TLS still came,
Week after week, as the excavation
Ended and boxes thumped into the trash,
Reports of books newly born, wild or tame,
Jacketed, crated, and shipped by the ton.
Reviewers plough on, as careers rise and crash—
Few are prized, most pulped, conveyed to landfills,
Compacted like coal, toppled timber, great fossils.