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.