Empires rise and fall in the blink of an eye, if your timepiece is vast enough, expansive enough to engulf the struggles of humans in the act of constructing and destroying that which they have built ….
I crunch this apple from New York’s fabled orchards thinking of the tower where my mother told my father that if every light in the city were to go dim in that very second, she would marry him, after all, and how the blackout came so quickly, unexpectedly, in quiet of the summer night, almost as suddenly as the day she left, with all lights blazing in her trail.
This poem is part of a month-long exploration of poetry writing around Wonders of the World, thank to Mary Lee over at A Year of Reading. Today’s theme was the Empire State Building, and I found myself honing in on the word “empire” and then thinking of family stories based on memories.
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