An ekphrastic poem, inspired by the painting ‘Fugue’, by Lu De’an, at VALA Art Center in Redmond, WA.

Day after day after day
it endures the constant beatings
of weather

stripped of color by sunlight
rivets rusted by rain
pummeled with debris by the wind

until it aches

A few dark patches
reveal where machinery once lived

hint at its former glory
extinguished without thought

Engineers had ideas
but left them unfinished
like stray crayon marks in a child’s book

Decay defines its remaining features
already slipping into distant memory

except for those fragments of broken speech
recorded by urban photographers

who find beauty in rubble

(16 September 2016)