Removal Day

Everything’s just as I want it:
all my possessions
laid out in my own home

till my furniture, unbidden,
packs itself into a van
that disappears through the gate.
Emulsion trickles down walls
to gather in its cans, newly liquid.
Switches and power points

click into non-existence;
wiring slithers back to its reels
in tightening coils.

Windows gape, unglazed,
at plasterboard departing
sheet by sheet by sheet.

Roof slates peel off into a stack;
exposed wooden trusses lower themselves
gingerly into the mud.

A flat oblong slab funnels into
a battered, orange concrete mixer
that’s rotating the wrong way

and a full-grown elm tree
levers itself upright,
a small rookery in its branches.

Helen Evans


If you have any thoughts on this poem,  Helen Evans would be pleased to hear them.