21 JULY 1990, Page 33

The Theft of the Vases

The lion-headed vases have disappeared. Someone has stolen them and left no trace (Pity I'm no detective, just a bard).

The wall loCiks bare without them: newly painted they'll be in England (or Wales) now perhaps. Criminals have sharp and clever maps.

What can I say? Eternity, he said, gravely rotates about the Grecian urn, a glamorous fixture high above the dead.

So these exist though they are somewhere else, and there are spaces where they used to be. Eternity exists in another place.

and in some other alien unknown garden our two eternal vases turn and turn.

lain Crichton Smith