Artefact
A kind of road
snakes down into the gravel pit.
Its rough surface
of shattered rocks
pinging off my car.
Turns, that seem purposeless,
where some obstacle
was blasted into smithereens.
Descending down
where the air feels heavier
the surface alien;
like a pock-marked asteroid
blackened, hard,
the far side of the moon
bombarded by meteors.
To the sun-baked bottom,
a treeless plain
where some hardy weeds, dusty green
eke out a living.
Big yellow machines
have stopped
as if all at once, suddenly,
when the clock struck closing time.
Colossal loaders and crushers, spewing dust,
monster trucks
gone berserk,
scuffed and scarred, and driven hard.
This could be a dystopian novel
post-apocalypse —
still, silent machines
waiting expectantly
for the men who never come.
Sand and gravel
quarried from the land,
where there was once a lake
a glacier
a Jurassic jungle.
Kids party here, in summer
all night long.
Leaving broken bottles.
Charred wood
from dead bonfires, badly doused.
Squealing tires
gouged into sand.
For now, it’s a scar
in a dark green forest.
And when abandoned
it will fill with ice-cold water,
like a deep glacial lake
carved into rock.
Preserving, perhaps
the big diesel machines
parked
in its freezing bottom.
Where future archaeologists
will excitedly ponder
what they could possible mean.
The poem moves back and forth between past, present, and future. So it puts our tiny sliver of time into perspective: not just a lost civilization — short and forgettable — but also one not much worthy of redemption.
It certainly didn’t start out this bleakly. I simply wanted to write something descriptive about a gravel pit — of which there are several nearby. Of course, I could have chosen “quarry” instead of “gravel pit”; which sounds a lot more positive. So perhaps it was inevitable, after all, that the poem would take this negative turn.
But whatever its message, my favourite part is still the word “smithereens”: worth writing a poem just to get that in somewhere!
No comments:
Post a Comment