The Museum of Emptiness
by Jonathan F J Taylor

Days are long here. The sun
  naps behind clouds, but doesn’t sleep.
    What can we do but wander the city?
      We eat. We wish for home, as for something
        accomplished and demanding no response.
 
To escape, we have been absorbed by
  countless treasuries: the Seafarers’ Museum,
    the King’s Particular Collection – mostly shells
      and leathery remains of sea-creatures
        tugged from their element. The promise
 
of the Gallery of Local Poets was, alas,
  untranslatable. The Moss Museum,
    the Scriptorium, displays of insect farming
      and the Ethnological Collection, with the renowned
        Cabinet of Inscrutable Fetishes: all these
 
we have dutifully contemplated.
  I am not sure how much I will remember.
    Afterwards, I lie on my back in one of the city’s
      spacious and irrigated parks, and observe
        clouds tumbled in from the west, the sun
 
edging them in a faint but lurid pink.
  There are too many, even of clouds.
    At times like this I think how impossible 
      my fellow humans are: how much we owe them
        and how little we understand currency.
 
They billow in shopping precincts
  like accumulations of loss. For our last days,
    we are saving the Museum of Emptiness
      whose galleries are lined with shelves
        where even breath is not allowed to rest.