Two vast and trunkless legs of steel
Like silent Pharaohs over Wall Street stood
Scraping the vast canvas of immortality
@poetry = How many died erecting those towers:
Welders of iron, exoskeletal beams?
Manhattan is missing her two front teeth
Can you help me find them?
@poetry = What were their thoughts on that morning's long fall?
Beat, you wings! Just another few breaths!
Millions of fingers of Flesh, of Memory ?
Sift and sift that ancient dust
@poetry = Manhattan is missing her two front teeth
Help me find them!
@poetry = Now, only a torn, disfigured pedestal remains
And on it these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.*
@poetry = Autumn, impervious,
Mocking our imperial pretense,
Swirls her bluest skirt, whips her hips,
Casts the bones of September
Like I-Ching sticks over Baghdad
Throwing sunsets to die for.
@auth poem = Mitchel Cohen
[The author is a member of the Red Balloon Poetry Conspiracy, and Brooklyn Greens
*Stanza recycled from Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1817. This poem is reprinted from Mitchel Cohen's The Permanent Carnival, 2006.]