avarice
Ellicott City, MD
2022, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
the sky collapses,
slowly
nature waits for nothing
and halts for no one.
watch the fools sing and dance and love
under the shattering sky, a bleeding mirror
of catastrophe, as if
they have time
to laugh.
come, sift through
the mercurial sand,
you material misers
see if your gold is worth tarnishing
let the silt sting your eyes
as you desecrate what was never yours
and the water runs dark with oil and wine.
spin skeins of silver into brittle straw
facing east in the setting sun
how long shall your footprints last?
oh, when the cracks crawl down
and no more roses bloom out of concrete
clouds.
Reflection
I believe that the beauty of art is that it can mean different things to different people, and different things to the same person at different stages of their life. I hesitate to plaster a set message on my artwork, but a meaning I’d like to come across is a simple theme of transience, and the priceless value of a present joy. In the context of climate change, this may mean the ripples of clean water, the rain that graces the earth, the purity of the air we breathe; every moment is precious.