My new house has an attic.
It’s filled with many things that prior
owners left behind or wanted to forget.
Every trunk a treasure of old what-nots and why-nots:
letters telling of a love lost on some foreign shore,
savings stamps and whirligigs,
old toasters, leather belts, clothes with moth holes,
train sets, puzzles, things I can’t identify.
All of them contain the dust
of many years of living.
Rooting through these finds
I find there isn’t much of value.
For all my time, I only have
a bad case of the sneezes.
published in A Safe and Brave Space, and Sonnets to Sing
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