Drawing on Bank of Tomorrow’s expectations,

Rested contentedly, brings on hopes agreeable

Teaching us manners to draw on No-tomorrow’s

Bank’s tangled contraband

Here is an advertising offer offered for amusement

A cross stitch; hardly a thriving thing surviving; art

Fetched from sear dusty death, a former age, surmised

To turn as quaint

This retro vintage something fad whatever

Task which remained Victorian ladies’ lots

Making, creating, by magnifying effort,

Here brought near us

See faded ladies longings languish web-encrusted

In droll old shops

Where junk resells turned by a whim into

A famous profit

Creations in which endeavour argues passion

Wove-in and finely interspersed by studied threads

Of piety and serious reflection

Found out by light

Hemmed-round- close-bounded in constricted lives

(Men and their ego marching roughshod trod the world)

Such shes like inmates fended how they may

To fill out life

Substantial and substantively, with something worthy faith

Their crowns of honest valour turned-to artefacts

Poured out indomitably instating meaning,

For worthless pence

Now to be had by high-street happy hunters

Who hang their homes with fashion’s urgent chic

Bargain rejections for their iPhone balance-sheet

Proclivities

Cross stitch abruptly rocks again now; rocks replete

And resurrected sells in weekly parts

TVs commend, selling the feature by its art

And novelty

A Hamlet without the prince, or Dr Faustus

Without a threat of Mephistopheles

Watered ameliorated lukewarm kinder-themes

Infant déclassé

Of alphabets, plain numbers, and perhaps a row

Of unaccomplished stick-stalk blooms upended

Arrays of simple tropes for simple browsers

That pass some time

Absent intricacy, imagination,

Daring and depth, emphatically no troth,

Or passion, only fashion for a sunny noon

Then to move on

Hereby is turned a fabricated fad

Slithering over surface ardours of a day

Across wide fecund deeps that rumination

Dead ladies fathomed, wherein wonders lay

Frighted, unwilling, unhappy to cast off

Outbound, onto a seascape unexplored

Rounding a horn of plenty onto scarcer shores

Where sea-things of sound valuation stray

Not beads to eyes and fancies, sturdier trusts

Pearls of foundation; and abalone whirls

Magical real receipts of explorations

Delving those pools

For possibility by earnest resolution

What might these seed in searching sojourners?

Who gather, sow, such denes of adulation

Into their frames