The Many Lyves of...A Poem by David Lewis PagetI’d never felt comfortable in that house Not once, since we’d moved on in, A rambling, derelict, barn of a house, Three storeys of age-old sin. Nobody said there’d been murders there, Or told of the gypsy’s curse, Three hundred years of discarded junk And I don’t know which was worse.
The air was dank, and creepy and cold So I opened the windows wide, Trying to get some airflow through To clear the smell inside. It was musty, dusty, smelt like a tomb With a corpse, decayed and grey, We cleaned and scrubbed it room by room And the smell went slowly away.
We tackled the ground floor first, we thought We could leave upstairs til last, The stairs were blocked with a French chaise longue From some distant time in the past, It was jammed hard up by the bannister rails So it wouldn’t go up or down, I said I’d have to pull it apart And that sparked a Hartley frown.
Hartley was the love of my life Who tackled that house as well, She said it was a pig in a poke That its real name was ‘Hell!’ But we finally cleared a space to live And she worked out a way to shift That French chaise longue from the stairway by Trying a twist and lift.
The second floor was a nice surprise There was none of the junk and grime, The bedrooms still remained as they’d been Laid out in another time, So Hartley dealt with the dust in there While I went up for a look, The room above was an attic room And that’s where I saw the book.
It lay on a dusty table with Its pages ragged and torn, The paper a sort of parchment and The ink, quite faded and brown. The cover was ancient leather, cracked And worn, as if by an age, ‘The Many Lyves of this House’ it had Embossed, as a title page.
I cautiously opened the cover, read The words on the parchment page, The light in the room then turned to gloom And a storm began to rage. I raced on down to the ground to find A man outside, who said, ‘For those inside, don’t seek to hide, I say, bring out your dead!’
And a cart stood out in the street outside A pile of the dead in place, The street was cobbled, not like before, But of bitumen, no trace. And on my door was a huge red cross With a white and painted scrawl, ‘God, have mercy on us,’ it read, ‘Have mercy on us all.’
And there on the floor, inside the door Was a corpse wrapped in a sheet, I dragged it out by the feet, no doubt, And I left it in the street. On climbing back to the topmost floor I leapt and pounced on the book, But the page had turned, and the fire burned Before I had time to look.
London burned in the distance and Lit up the night like day, I didn’t know of it then, but it Was burning the plague away, And every page in that cursèd book Brought a different time to bear, ‘The Many Lyves’ that this house had lived Were all inscribed in there.
I slammed that leather cover shut And I laid it on its face, Then swore that I’d never open it While the Lord would lend me grace. And Hartley, dragged from her cleaning chores She never could understand, Why I put a torch to that ancient house And burnt it to the ground.
David Lewis Paget © 2015 David Lewis PagetFeatured Review
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