Wednesday, 11 September 2013

Poetry Please - Rhapsody in Black

As my current webserver is closing down, I'm going to migrate some of my older writing and poetry to here, beginning with this piece, as it is apt to the date.

Rhapsody in Black

Two figures standing silent on the corner,
Sentinels of glass and steel,
Watching over their noirish dreamland,
Their home of the brave, land where nothing is free.
Lonely, mist-bound romantics,
Ghosts of the coffee-house and the opera house,
Burning a thousand warm candles in the night,
Echoes of Gershwin at the day's dawning.
Dark shapes at dusk,
Guardians of these mean streets,
Patron saints of cruelty and greed,
Paladins of cold, hard honour.
Twin pinnacles reaching for eternity,
The new mansions of millions of years,
Rooted in blood they rise in crescendo,
To dreams of highest art.
The silhouettes of an ideal,
Spectral custodians of a bygone age,
A fantasy of indomitable will,
Fallen into flame and dust.
Ivy-strewn skeletons, side-by-side,
All that remains of a once-great world,
In the cold shadow of the bomb,
Yet now they stand no more.
An empire of the mind,
Past, present,
Future,
And never was.
Gone.

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