Doomed Ruins Under a Brooding Sky

Back of Old BHS (1928-1989) - Auditorium Wing

Photo by

Kent Durk

Testament

James Hart

Abandoned High School Building, Brookfield, Missouri

BHS Front Door, BHS-Landscapes by Kent Durk*

Inside these walls, read the testament

of wind and water, remember thunder sounding

down the stairs after years of rain soaked nights,

youthful ghosts evacuating past at school day’s end.

History’s script in glass and plaster litters floors,

paint like sensitive skin peels from metal surfaces,

privacy panels in the abandoned restrooms

attest to rust and randomness of what falls,

what retains its place.  Here, the lords of darkness

and the armored gods of chaos rule the nights,

the daylong sun penetrates windows, mullions

pass empty shadows over warped, buckled boards.

Any passerby looking in might remember English

teachers parsing Shakespeare into memory’s particles,

assessing Emily’s certain slant of light and how

on winters’ afternoons the shadows do hold

their breath in hallways where nothing living happens.

Here is a declaration of dependence on heat and frost

to repeat their upheavals endlessly in the name of change:

shift, drop, clatter, collapse the only necessary vocabulary

studied here.  Minuscule from time’s ancient pages,

mold and mildew ink the handwriting on these walls,

silence deafening in its loneliness the only language

we know for what happens here, the life of dying.

August 29, 2010

*The original picture by Kent Durk for which

I wrote this poem is no longer available.  However,

any of Kent Durk's photos seen in the slide show

at the link below provide a brilliant testament

to my poem's images of doom.

http://www.360icon.com/Fotografs/brookfield.html

Stone Panel over Front Door
Old BHS - Photo by jmh