photo of sunrise over Stonehenge

Stonehenge
Geoffrey A. Landis


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



Links

picture of Iron Angels cover
Iron Angels

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.