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