Oil and detritus
The last of it
Seeps from the husk
Onto sand
The broken trust
The world won’t ever
Forget us
Not when we’re gone
And turned to dust
The wind will howl
Forlorn chorus
Each year more rubble
And detritus
How would the world
Hope to forget us
As all we touched
Turns to rust
About the poem
I originally published this on Yahoo! Voices in 2011. That platform has since pretty much died. I hadn’t thought about it in more than a year and it would be all but gone were it not for Flickr needing my Yahoo! credentials. I thought I’d repost it here. I hadn’t even thought about it in a year, so it was a rush when it flooded back. It’s very much inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias (Wikipedia). In Shelley’s, the poet speaks of the eroded ruins of a glorious statue. Instead, I bemoan how much of this age will never be forgotten. Not when we put permanent materials to use in temporary products.
About the image
At the tail end of 2011, the Seli 1 started breaking up off the coast of Blaauwberg, Cape Town, after being stranded there since 2009 (News24 / Times). I drove up to the area with my good friend Sean Messham (some of his most recent work at Messham Photography) to witness the clean-up effort. He took amazing photos (as usual). I was lucky to snap this on my not-so-smartphone.
Uneducate 