Stonehenge
Once, when I was a child, I touched the weathered grey surfaces of the
standing stones of
Stonehenge, damp with rain on a foggy morning;
And I have sat, alone in the dark, in the
burial chamber in the heart of the great
pyramid of Khufu, under a million tons of stone,
far away from the noise and bustle of the trinket sellers and taxi drivers;
And I have walked
in the ruins of Shalimar, once the most beautiful
garden on the earth, in a land
that many
claim but no one owns.
And I walk down Broadway, in the city we name New York, the night
pulsating with neon,
with stone and glass
rising hundreds of feet
overhead; I have walked among crowds
numbering a million people and
more.
And I remember Stonehenge, silent except for the drip of the rain and
the distant noise of the highway.
And the sands of Giza.
And the dry stone waterfalls of Shalimar.
No one knows who raised the monoliths of Stonehenge, or why.
They were already ancient
when the first pyramid was built.
Who will remember us?
--Geoffrey A. Landis
Aoife's Kiss, December 2009
Page by Geoffrey A. Landis
2010
Image shows Stonehenge at summer solstice sunrise.
Image by Andrew Dunn, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.