The Roman Colosseum, Image from Microscoft
poem submitted to "1487" poetry contest, Brian Strand, sponsor, 7/10/2026
The Colosseum sits~ a fractured crown, its arches a circlet of light where jeweled sun gathers, I walk its perimeter, my fingers grazing limestone warm as living skin. Dust rises~ a faint ghost of applause, of fear, of spectacle braided with longing. History here is not distant; it presses close, grainy and intimate. The broken tiers curve like a half-remembered sentence, one the empire began, but time insisted on finishing. Grass grows where violence once bloomed; the sky claims the open roof as if to remind the ruin that even power must answer to light. I feel a strange tenderness: noting how even magnificence erodes, how power becomes dust, how what remains is not violence but vulnerability~ the open sky pouring through what once was sealed. The Colosseum reminds me that time builds and erases in the same breath, and that beauty endures most fiercely in the places where the world has already learned how to break.
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