Just a Relic.

The information tape
tells me this was a dining room,
a blackened reminder of former splendour.
People used to travel from all over
for the summer parties
that spilled out onto the sloping lawn,
down to the fountain.
That too, now just a relic,
a huge mossy man rising out of a pool,
one of his hands crumbled,
sunk to the watery depths.

It reminds me of going to lay flowers
on my Nan’s grave.

Music from the ballroom sounds in my ears
and I touch the cool bricks.
Ghosts of stairs decorate the walls,
but there is no remainder of the floors they led to.
Isn’t it strange
that the ceiling has become the sky,
and the people who lived here
have disappeared?

In the graveyard, a fading inscription read
‘Oh how I miss her,
but only a bleeding heart alone
can tell I have lost her’.
Now her name,
even the one who inscribed
an eternal message of love
has gone.

Time rolled through me
as I realised its immensity.