Revels in the Dark

My footprints
are washed from the sand
by the desert wind.

I stand at the foot of a shattered statue a fellow traveler once described as 'two vast and trunkless legs of stone", hand holding my shemaugh over my mouth to keep out the sand.

I come
-- something between a pilgrim and a ghost --
to look on the works of the king of kings and despair.

The wind whistles through the legs and over the half buried head which lies tilted up out of the sand near the statue's base.

I sit in the spare shade of the legs,
as I do every year,
and let my eyes wander about the empty desert, taking some comfort in the shared company of the forgotten monument.

I pray to a nameless god, the phantom lord of all forgotten things, that something of Ozymandius endures.