Museum Pieces

Carefully crafted
jars of alabaster,
each of them a work of art,
a thing only a prince could purchase,
lined up,
once holding precious parts –
hearts, spleens, gall,
once so precious, life-giving
and worthy of preservation,
never imagining they would become museum pieces,
dry and brittle,
the life drawn out of them,
on display to the very commoners
they would have despised
in life.

About this poem. 

We carry things with us – anger, sadness, fears, preserving them like something precious. Yet all that lives on is love.

The picture was taken at the Albany Institute of Art and History.

Tom