Gone (after Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead)

The old South Kensington Museum

Is not a place I'll ever see again, though

Once I trawled contentedly around
The shallow dioramas,

Pressed brass buttons

To make things spin or glow,

Approving then the forced perspectives and

The little figures in their period gear.

Then, after scrabbling for that golden ball
I stood with other children at the automatic door,

A wondrous harbinger of soon.

I took my son last week

And he was all agog

To see the mighty three-ton lens from Castle Birr

Ground for a year, none bigger ever made, but

Now (they said) no longer on display -
Lugged off to some remote suburban store.

And what we saw on every floor
Instead of all the things we'd come to see

Was all the crap that's taken over science.

Gone the Deltic Locomotive,
Baby blue with golden whiskers, 

Gone too Caerphilly Castle, 

Signal box and tram, The working model coal mine

Gone. 

Downstairs a loud Australian "worked the room"

As schoolkids shrieked. 

Balloons went bang, the whole place stank

Of feet, was all unserious.

It's also all so gone to pot:

A lot of other stuff's been thrown out. 

A sad-eyed warden told me that

The maritime gallery, a favoured place,

Was closing soon to (can you believe)

Become a new hands-on display of telecoms.

Gone the brass and iron apprentice models

Gone the engines, blueprints and maquettes,

Gone the wide-hipped dreadnoughts

Fishing sloops and trawlers, clippers and destroyers

Blue riband Cunarders

And London's only model quinquireme.

They're phasing out the simple stuff

The dirty heavy simple stuff

That made us what we used to think we were.

That past, the only one we have, is going, going, gone

While out on Exhibition Road

The street is full of motor cars, pedestrians and air.