Valuable Literary Works Lost — Reward Offered

by Peter Finch

In 1972 Brian Wake
read at the No Walls Poetry Club, in a spare room
above the Marchioness of Bute (now Boots),
beer, words & passion. In the celebration
that followed a briefcase carrying
his complete typewritten texts was mislaid, left
on a padded bar–stool, on a table,
or against a toilet wall.

VALUABLE LITERARY
WORKS LOST REWARD OFFERED
ran three nights in the Echo Personals
nothing.

Through the years Wake got most things back
carbons, notes, copies —
most bar two, naturally life’s best.
Memory the trickster told him that,
greatest things he’d ever done.

He reads me a new poem made thirty years on
from faltering memory, crackles and slugs,
but not as good as the lost, Wake’s sure.
Can’t get it back, the gone.
We look at the past — smudgy thing —
and we love it, full of hope.
Didn’t know what love and death were then. Do now.
Here’s another new one, Wake says,
and it’s mature pain and coded order,
quiet, fits the way our faces hang.

What was it about despair and joy
and fervour that we used to know?