Poem: Curiosity Shop


Shop with antique items

Artifacts advertise ancient amenities:
(All items backwardly anapestiferous)
Brass-banded bureaus of burnished brown brilliance
Crystal carafes, a cello, a chafing dish,
Delicate doilies in Damascene doubleness,
Ermine-lined uniforms, elegant epaulets,
Fine-feathered, filigreed, fragile French furniture,
Gewgaws and gargoyles grimacing on gravy boats,
Heavy-hooved horses and hunters in hall hangings,
Ivory idols and imports from Ireland,
Juxtaposed jewelry, a jasperized jardiniere
Kitchenware, kitsch, knickknackery, knobkerries
Lorgnettes, and lockets, and lithogravure.
Mantuan mandolins, monogrammed mustache mugs,
Napery nestled 'neath needlepoint neckerchiefs,
Oyster tongs, Oscar Wilde's opera omnia,
Petit point printings of prim, prosy platitudes,
Quilts quintessentially queenly in quality
Reams of rhymes roaring in rodomontade.
Scintillant scimitars, sconces, soap sculpturings,
Teapots and trumpets, trivets, a tambourine,
Upleaping unicorns in ultra-ubiquity,
Volumes Victorian, violas, velocipedes
Whatnots for witchcraft, watchcases, wardrobe trunks
Xanthic wood xylophone bars tuned chromatically
Yarn yardage, youth portraits yellowed with age.
Zodiacs, zebras, detritus from falling star
(Some fell on Zurich, the rest zoned on Zanzibar.)

Objects bespeaking refined domesticity
Ranged in alliterate alphabeticity.


Image Credit: Damascene antique shop by Wikimedia