The collected poems of Roger Casement
The hat she wore for her engagement
All packed away and years before sent
To a hidey hole in a dingy basement
Notes from men in army camps
Upper Volta vintage stamps
Turkish silver nipple clamps
Stuffed birds made into table lamps
Gramophone records, one by Jacques Brel
And Rossini's Overture for William Tell
A shiny pebble, a cockle shell
Letters postmarked Motherwell
A faded dog-eared map of Dorset
A painful looking whalebone corset
With leather straps to reinforce it
And help a lady's silky drawers fit
Recipes torn from magazines
How to cook fresh otters' spleens
Roasted with smilyanski beans
Took Balkan taste buds to extremes
To keep her safe a shiny pistol
Stamped T Page Wood, Gunmaker, Bristol
A whiskey glass of hand cut crystal
Her father's guiding words epistle
A cutting of a lover's locks
In a lacquered Chinese wooden box
They'd met once in a shady copse
He'd left her with a bunch of phlox
Bundles of old photographs
Formal poses, no one laughs
Standing upright like flag staffs
Now sun-bleached sepia epitaphs
Contained within this trunk so vast
Unlocked for me to see at last
These treasures wondrously amassed
Reveal a woman's amazing past
I wish that I had known her then
In a different time, an era when
The entire world revolved for men
I wish she could live her life again