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)