That mossy stone there,
man-shaped with such care,
blindly, it stares
at me, and everyone else.
Proud gaze, unaware,
eroding green eyes and hair,
yet somehow it stares,
returned gazes for 300 years.
And now it sits here:
a stone’s new home.
Uncertain ancient leer,
frequented, and alone,
this spectacle is skeptical
of ever going home
to that stone dead carver,
that human he calls father,
long buried under fodder
who shaped him at such cost,
sunken and decayed like
me in one hundred years.
He receives my gaze into
its vacuum void
and waits here, dumb,
while I can’t avoid,
my future fodder blanket,
while this mossy face sits
suspended halfway through his collapse
like a frozen atomic blast.
I am amazed by
his ancient past.
Tell me statue, What was it like?
who did you astonish with delight,
the queen and those alike,
or everyone in the plaza?
With your Elizabethan collar, folds of rock,
I think you peer into my thoughts.
Clever carver carved canny,
and made to impress,
a stone man so sturdy
he will surpass my breath.
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