After a long, trying, kinda sad day (would have been my parents’ anniversary), another artist on Fine Art America paid me a real compliment. I went to check out her work and came across a photo she had taken of an abandoned ampitheatre. Immediately, this reminded me of one of my favorite poems written by my grandmother, Beatrice Allen Page. I know it’s not Mondays with Muddy, and it’s a good possibility that I’ve posted it before, but I’m going to share it now anyway because it’s my blog and I win. When you’re done reading the poem, be sure to check out the photo I linked to above and “like” her image to boost its visibility on Fine Art America:
DELPHI
Emptiness broods on the ampitheatre.
Time has gnawed at the stone tiers.
Weeds and moss grow in the chinks.
Furtive salamanders scribble
cryptograms in ancient dust.
Throngs no longer gather here
to have their heartstrings played upon
by Attic tragedies.
Yet a sombre chorus of women
circles mutely in time’s shadow,
their invisible hands linked in common woe.
The scuffle of their worn sandals
makes a sound like autumn wind
sighing through age-old memory.
Masks conceal their faces.
Grief is more durable than stone.
Long before the theatre was built,
the moving choir had begun in hollows of cypress-dotted hills,
on wind-swept plains, inside walls
and towns. And still goes on
down through the ages, throughout the earth
an ever-widening circle of women
mourning the death of the warriors:
fathers…brothers…husbands…sons.
And children not yet born.
