<< Back to David's poetry
<< Back to "Millions Poetry Competition" poems

Time weighs heavily on solid slabs of stone.
Time's weightless burden sags the buildings bone,
Times impress, its pregnant belly leaves its curvilinear mark
And solid stone now yields like the cloth that cups to hold the harvest home.
Time slumps and slouches, her long and languid licking
Rasps and shapes this rock, this hard place.

So these steps bow and sigh where a million treads have scuffed and trod.
The mason’s pure line has been
Gradually stretched and pulled to a mathematician’s perfect parabola.
What was planned, quarried and carefully carved and cut
Has now been distressed by the blind feet of a thousand dead sculptors
And who, step by step, have each added their part to this posthumous show.

© David Johnson, April 2010