The Woollen Mitten Poem by david condell

Its fragile threads have almost come apart,
like many stories lost in London`s clay;
With bones and boots, and pieces of a cart,
displayed as they were found, the objects lay
like runes that must be read: of toil and earth
and hamlets, smoke-skeins rising in the sky,
of noise of people gathered by a path
and pigs and cattle jostling in a sty
where wagons wait to cross the river Fleet;
the river that was choked into a brook,
then dammed, polluted, paved below a street,
then blitzed, and tilled, returning what it took,
laid down in priceless layers long ago,
from tiny children playing in the snow.