A Poem

[Bethlehemtown]

I won't bore you in talking about the genesis of this poem, but I was thinking about impermanence. The subject matter here is the architectural landscape, but I think it may apply to changing fashions as well.


The Air Takes No Impressions

No matter how near the surface
Or the clearness,
The air takes no impressions,
Even of the birds.

Only the transfixing mind
Sees the past in abandoned spaces,
As memory fills the site
Of a lost landscape.

That granite and brick and mortar
Should melt away so unmeasured,
Like the symbols we no longer see
In the Old Masters, peer though we might.

It is the meaning we miss,
The unending evaporation of the familiar.
But new eyes gaze on freshness,
Where even sorrow has its curiosity.

[storeynicholas]

This is provocative. I think that we find more curiosity in sorrow than in joy because we have more time to investigate sorrow. Sorrow lingers. Joy flees.
NJS