The Viking Exhibition at The British Museum, bright gold and Skaldic verse ...

I'm sitting in my parents' lounge, gazing at photographs of aunts - small clouds are slowly moving across the blue sky - the tiny lawns in the back garden are newly edged -

Yesterday afternoon, before I returned here, to feel time congeal around me, I went to the Vikings Exhibition at the British Museum - 

As always, I felt a cool necklace of fear around my neck as I entered the lift at Russell Square Tube Station - 

The Exhibition was very crowded - in some rooms, I had to shuffle along, hemmed in by men wearing gorgeous tweed jackets, shyly sidestepping beautiful women clasping their audio guides like wands - 

There, before me, were the bright gold treasures, carried across wintry seas to smokey halls - 

There were the rust eaten swords, still terrible - 

There were the jewel like words of the skalds, still as sharp as the honed edge of an axe - 

They went boldly 

West for gold

Fed the eagle

Out in the East 

And died in the South

In Saracenland 

- Skaldic verse, about AD 954