Tuesday, December 7, 2021

If Dickens Were a Ditch Digger

A while back I posted "If Galileo Were a Gardener" after Charles Tomlinson's poem "If Bach Had Been a Beekeeper." I wrote a series of poems in this vein, and from time to time they will crop up. Today is such a day. 


If Dickens Were a Ditch Digger

                     after Charles Tomlinson


If Dickens were a ditch digger

he would have shoveled the muck

of London, manure and mud clinging

to his clothes, as he uncovered a child's

broken crutch or exposed a tattered

piece of wedding veil beneath layers

of earth harboring ghostly reminders

of splintered lives while pesky

young pickpockets marked others

as he worked, quietly mulling over

his finds and shaping tales to entertain

his children at home, mesmerize

his mates at the pub.



Marilyn Aschoff Mellor

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