Remembering Who

In another month we will be deep into summer
and you won’t be able to see it from the road,
this factory with its marble walls and fallen roof,
with it’s trees grown through the floor, ripe
for another season of neglect.

In the seventeenth century people came
to the Coliseum in Rome, fallen and in ruins,
and hauled way the stone for their own homes.
Throughout Rome, they sit in walls, anonymous.

That does not seem to have happened here.
Every stone, perfectly coifed and square, remains,
Fallen over, covered in vines, the remaining walls
perfectly square still. A tribute both

to the builders and to time.
Each with their own power, each
with their own magic, good and evil,
One deliberate, one less so.

I wake. The soft flesh of my feet find the floor.
For a moment, I feel the time. I feel the dark
only abandonment leaves, in my bones.
I walk like an old man,

but only for a few steps until
I remember who I am. What I am.
A builder. Of souls perhaps, but a builder still,
and I remember. Youth returns

and before I hit the stairs, I am myself,,
victor again over time and neglect,
ready to love, and push back the vines
of darkness that threatens us all.

About this poem.

Well, that was a surprise. Not at all the poem I set out to write.

The picture was taken not far from me, just over the border in New York.

Tom