Like lifting lino - underneath

another world revealed.

Adverts for corsets, garden twine

and orthopaedic shoes.

News of a war, or peace in our time.

                      * 

I move the realistic rocks we made

for the museum. I painted them, grey and gnarled,

but it was you who made the frame.

And stretched between the two

is paper mache.

Seeing the stories from

not so very long ago.

Headlines

turned hard and dry and brittle.

Looking like a rock and yet

behind the grey façade

just words and words and words

meaning little now,

like life, enduring

in our paper mache.