No picturesque ruins will remain for us
To wander through with our sketchbooks and pens
For drawing pictures or writing blank verse
About bare ruin’d 2 air-conditioning ducts
The baptismal font will be repurposed
As a bird-bath (with a plastic Saint Elvis)
And the stained-glass windows will be sold off
As fashionable bathroom accessories
The crucifix of deplorable design 3
Will be stored in the back of someone’s garage
Until the girls carry it off to the woods
And laughingly use it for target practice
A rubbly field will serve as a soccer pitch
Until seventy years 4 have passed away
1 Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”
2 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73
3 Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited
4 Daniel 9:1-2
Your ‘umble scrivener’s site is:
Reactionarydrivel.blogspot.com.
It’s not at all reactionary, tho’ it might be drivel.
Lawrence Hall’s vanity publications are available on amazon.com as Kindle and on bits of dead tree: The Road to Magdalena, Paleo-Hippies at Work and Play, Lady with a Dead Turtle, Don’t Forget Your Shoes and Grapes, Coffee and a Dead Alligator to Go, and Dispatches from the Colonial Office.