THE BUILDERS FROM STONE

These great walls, temples, pyramids and obelisks

Buttresses, ramparts, towers, immense, imperishable.

Enduring from the long dead past, they stand through

the multitude of centuries against the blast and rage of

suns and storms. Their shadows count the hours, the aeons.

 

Who were the men who prised these stones from

the earth, shaped them, hauled them, set them with

tongue and groove one on the other? Kings and Generals,

Captains of slave hordes, wise masons holding the

secrets of their arts and science. Long gone to the

raw earth they worked.

 

We cannot know them, tell their names,

only stand in awe and wonder how they

did these things.

 

Max Frost

23 Feb 2002

 

 

WRITTEN ON STONE

 

One day, when we are long gone and

Mad mutant dogs roam the altered land

strewn with moraines from some ice Age,

the sun nearer to the Super Nova stage,

maybe a strange creature, unimaginable now

a final failure that our genes endow,

not recognisable as Human form,

building a shelter from a cosmic storm,

may ponder these inscriptions on ancient stones:

Laid by Councillor Horace William Jones,

or grasp bemused in his prehensile paw:

Here lies Mabel Smith aged seventy-four.

Perhaps uncomprehending gaze for a while

at: London Four Hundred Miles.

 

Max Frost

1 Mar 2002