Some Musings Amidst The Ruins

Some Thoughts Among The Ruins.

Columns stretch smooth 
white fingers to the sky,

reaching for the gods 
that forsook them.

Ancient structures melted 
by the grasp of time,
lean softened by the erosion 
of their infrastructures.

The senate is adjourned 
and Caesar is a salad now.
The catacombs have teeth 
of bones projecting
in a disarray of former 
residents assembled.

The Coliseum is an 
empty shell of despair,
one can hear the haunted 
cries of the martyrs
and the clang of steel 
on steel from the gladiators
as they shadow its 
remnants in the sun.

Statues of former heads 
of state lie headless,

anonymous torsos posed 
in permanent obscurity.

The Roman empire is 
left a pyre of rubble 
burning in the 
scorching winter sun.

A monument to man's follies, 

all of his greatness lessened,
to great boulders, 

amidst the great boldness
of today's Rome at large. 

Perhaps a thousand 
years from now,
cities like New York, 
and Paris will also
lie in such tranquil, 
disquieted ruin.

The Eiffel tower a rusted, 

dissolving mass 
of twisted metal,
the Statue Of Liberty 
minus arms and head.
As nature worms its insidious 
way back into the forms,
that mankind sealed beneath 
cobbled highways,
and concrete structures 
forever demolished.

I toss a Roman coin 

purchased in an 
antiquity shop.

into the dry bed of 
a fountain emptied of life,

and make a wish 
that my children's, 

children's grandchildren,

will find a way to stop 

the decay of man's legacy

and share a lasting world 

in splendid teeming cities,

that have learned to survive 

side by side with 
nature's glories.