All good things must come to an end: Kate Morgan-Clare and I packed up the last of The Little Museum of Ludlow yesterday, returning lent objects to their owners, and gathering into the fabulous wheelbarrow (I love that wheelbarrow, unacquisitively) a selection of our found objects to return them to the town…
And then we pushed it back across Ludlow, from Ludlow Library, along Tower Street, across the Bull Ring, up King Street, and back to the derelict garden where the wheelbarrow has rested for decades. In the hot sun, kneeling on weeds turned crackly with drought, Kate slowly placed the objects we’d brought at the foot of a crumbling old wall.
I wrote a poem.
Returning the Wheelbarrow Behind the Gate
You will crashsqueak on dry earth. Lurch
this weedy, sudden garden to the space
the barrow had.
Put down your burden. Breathe.
Kneel in dry leaves.
Be slow.
Place a bone to an ivy root.
Lay
a paper flower pinkly by the wall.
Thread a tattered feather
past a root-loop.
A labelled rip of rubber spun
off a tyre on Old Street leans
on a twig not native to this place.
Slip
a luckless scratchcard
to a knuckle bone sucked dry by dogs.
Hear rook-caw.
Rain
reverent confetti. Rain its petals
on the footings
of this limey, head-high wall.
Let ring
a rolling quarter-chime of church bells.
Labels dangle. Stir. Feather
quivers in a swell of air.
Wheelbarrow Tag No. 9891
has gone
to rest among the nettles.
JEAN ATKIN 