Silent Echoes

Signs are groping silently
And, slowly shimmering in noonday sun,
The nearby trees stand waving.
But the signs stand still,
Their parched brown heads like any old Egyptian's,
Faces full of worldly hieroglyphs
They cannot comprehend,
Still chattering mutely to unheeding gods.

The street lamps, caught with heads averted
As if at the moment of casting,
Each like all the others of its caste,
stare down, monotonous, along their solemn avenues,
Those dusty halls whose feeble flares
Forever light retreating tunnels to the past,
Now hushed, no power left within them.
The silence lengthens…

Arrested long ago, these sightless symbols,
Silent gropers of another day, can ever stir
No more than people of Pompeii. But like them,
Mingle, less with great, with shaven skulls atop stiff spines,
The silent drone of empty phrases to a silent sky.
Forever locked in place as blank-faced sentinels,
They seem the lifeless armsticks of some long-forgotten
Semaphore, still pointing nowhere in particular.

And nothing steps and nothing shrills
But a fitful wind,
Whistling as in a flapping shroud
Around these sparsely scattered shells
Of dead grey ikons strung like gibbets
Up the sullen hill,
And finally only echoes of a single image
Dying out into an empty sky.