Bags

Bags

Black plastic sacks, bin-liner packs

Flapping, slapping in the bitter breeze

Stacked untidily, racked at random

Untied tops flopping open

Revealing random contents

Overflowing innards

Blowing about in the wind

A growing contribution

Spilling like guts onto the pavement

Filling up this rank rented doorway

People step around this rubbish on the ground

A nocturnal delivery secretly unloaded by darkness

No ceremony in its disposal

Dumped like a dead body for someone else to find

To pick up and pick over

To carefully sort, and store and show

Hoping to sell for trifling sums

In the charity shop

Making useful profit

From this seeming careless casual drop

Is this all there is to show?

Are these the collected works

The years-prized possessions

The sum total of a life gathered together

Then placed here by a grieving wife?

Cherished memories carefully put aside

Assembled, valued, sorted, sifted

Into different piles

With generous motivation

And charitable intention?

Or the results of a hurried clearance?

To a doorway closer than the dump

An all-night reception facility

A problem easily offloaded

Without any questions asked

Out of sight, out of mind

A rapid sweeping together

Of unwanted things that meant a lot

To someone once

Or unbearable reminders

With their odours and associations

That can no longer be endured?

Copyright Andy Fawthrop 2014