TRAVEL INKWELL: A NEW POEM...

Travel Inkwell…

A small jewellery box perhaps, clasped shut,

A spring mechanism hunched taut in anticipation Of its flicked opening,

Like a Jack-in-the-box, disregarded;

Yet the rusted coil revealed a slotted inkwell,

Its original contents hard like lumps of eye-liner,

Discarded…

Was it the travelling companion of a young lady,

Taking the Grand Tour, enabling her pen

A journal to scribe?

Or was it the necessity for a young poet,

Forsaking his family, his words of love,

In rhyming sonnets to describe?

Or indeed, was it hidden inside an officer’s luggage

At Passchendaele perhaps, into which he dipped a weary pen

To write regretful letters home to mothers, 

Or wives, or girlfriends

Of the slaughtered, the maimed, the heroic

And of the missing, presumed dead, the sacrificed lovers? 

Pete Ray

February 2018  

Manufactured by Perry and Co., this travel inkwell set me thinking… 

Victorian…

One of the factories was positioned in St Paul’s Square, Birmingham, a place I walked through to get to work at Birmingham’s Museum & Art Gallery for a number of years…

Neat item, bought from the excellent ‘StolenAttic’…