On Gonzo's Pond: DustBy Luis Gonzalez
Morning is a hammer far to the west. Jackhammers. Dump trucks. Saw blades screaming like insects in a metal forest. Sand into brick, brick into house, house into neighborhood, and eventually dust. Dust floats. Dust folds into dust. I hear it, over the pond. I see it in the glassy ripple, water holding itself like a thought, refusing to move too fast, refusing to judge. The pond does not flinch. The pond remembers.
Shelley drifts through the reeds, Ozymandias, the king’s sneer caught in bronze, swallowed by sand. Everything grand becomes dust. Everything mighty becomes a footnote. Stone is brittle. Hubris is comic. Time does not apologize. And the pond already knows this, has always known it. It watches anyway. It folds the world in, lets it drift, lets it settle, lets it go.
Ozymandias – Percy Bisshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal 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.”
Continue reading:
https://boilingfrogs.wordpress.com/2025/11/16/on-gonzos-pond-dust/
