THE COLLECTOR Poem by Esther Jansma

This was not found in some attic but down
at rock bottom, like things left after
a modern death, limp neglected tat
in the hands of the heir, myself, collector.

It is not a desire for something higher that drives me
into the depths: it is little and insolent, picking up clothes
not worth the dustman's while - turned into uneven
paving, rain-stained - to know what it was like.

It is scrabbling, in pursuit of the vanishing,
the people of the past, shards of thought,
sequences which led to action - planing wood,

snipping out small clothes - moments,
long ago, which really were and were really
vanished till someone grasps them, reads them back.