Sic transit...

Just off Calcutta’s Dalhousie Square
is a firm that deals in sanitaryware.

Yet it interests me that once
they were purveyors of guns:

one of a galaxy of smiths
long since reduced to sepia-ed myths.

Names that once graced chic arcades,
and now prop crumbling colonnades.

Sometime in an empire’s long twilight
this one knew that guns wouldn’t be right;

and so moved, with presumed ease,
to bathroom fixtures from gun grease…

But if you’re wondering, I’m no recorder
for the ancient house of R B Rodda –

Yesterday, idling vacant hours
I saw the mailbox that once was ours;

fallow now, save for stray vagrants
given a home, and a stale fragrance.

And another empire’s loss seen in
a memory of a gunsmith’s porcelain.

***