Spans

Spans (Inspired by Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias") If one pursues the desert, smooth and vast, They will not glimpse the history buried there. The monuments constructed did not last, Save by poet’s pen upon paper. A fixèd mast protruding from the spans; The endless stream of time will wear all down, Like flowing sand within an hourglass, For colors mix inexorably to brown. So irony has come with human life, The closed events that circle round and round, As goes delight to sadness, joy to strife And all of history lost to passing’s glare, Emotion, insight, love, belief, despair, Forever locked in rock’s unyielding care.