The Detritus of Time

by Michael Noonan

They thought it permanent;
the arrangement they had made with time.
The solemn sacrifices in the temples.
The grave and portentous debates
in the Senate House.
The combat in the Arena,
the races in the Hippodrome.
The triumphs of their generals.
The captive slaves
taken from subjugated lands.
The arches of victory,
the statues of Gods and Emperors.
Their boasts of order and command,
their laws and proclamations.
Those stones would last for eternity.
 
Now bare, featureless walls,
broken pillars,
fragments of sculpture,
mysterious mosaics
and shards of pottery,
are all that remain
of what was once a city.
Dilapidated and derelict,
it rots amid silence;
and is only given what atom of sentience
a passing stranger brings.
A phantom life,
in fleeting notes
of wonderment and sadness.
Captured images,
and fading memories.
Here, amid these carcass bones,
only ghosts
speak to the living.
 
Tiny scavengers
scurry in the long grass
between weathered stones.
Birds pick at seeds
on the roughened,
pockmarked earth.
Where senators and slaves had walked,
dead leaves are driven
by the breath of the wind.
Above, the same sky
which vaulted its living streets and precincts,
now frames its ruins.
 
Mordant, melancholy wreckage.
The mere shadow of past glories.
The slow, ponderous earth
devours what man had created from it.
The stones he had quarried
to carve his palaces,
it now ingests,
like a beast
masticating its own progeny.