Mirage by Barbara LaTondresse
Is the glass half empty or half full?
Or perhaps there is no glass at all.
Only the illusion of the glass.
Are we as a nation that needy?
Are we lost in a desert of our own making?
Are we another Ozymandias reborn in the good old USofA?
All that remains of this ‘king of kings’ is a broken statue to former glory and the empty words full of loss.
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.”
Great rulers and their kingdoms will fall, dust to dust.
Ozymandias-like we strut our transient power unaware
our desperate need of Eternal water else
we become another thirsty relic in the sand.
That a drop of water would
quench thirst in this dry,
parched land is a pipedream.
Oh, to get the cool water drawn from the well that shall never run dry; Eternal Water drawn from the Eternal Well.
King of kings and Lord of lords!
Eternal Power. Eternal Spring.
When?
___________
Background Notes
“Ozymandias” is the title of two related sonnets published in 1818. The first was written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and was published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. The poem was included the following year in Shelley’s collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826. Shelley’s most famous work, “Ozymandias” is frequently anthologized. (from wiKi)
Read Shelley ’s short sonnet below to gain essential background to understand my poem Mirage.How does this fit with what’s NORMAL ?
What do you think the NEW NOMRAL wlll be?
_______________
Ozymandias By Percy Bysshe Shelley – 1792-1822\
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far
**This poem is in the public domain.
____________
The photo is courtesy of: https://coldbrookgallery.wordpress.com/
Night Lights and Morning Joys 