Ephebe of Marathon Looks out the Courtyard Window

November 10, 2021

Through the glass I watch you flock to the feathered vermin. They flaunt their tail-fans as you make images with those strange light-tablets that have come into fashion the last few decades.

I have watched you for lifetimes, for you once sang praises of my beauty. But no longer do you notice my placid gaze, my bronzed glaze of sinew.

Father knew of my value. So rapt was he in love that, upon my completion, for fear I may be marred, he gave his soul to preserve my form for as long as living eyes may see. Ironic, now, that few eyes come to see me.

But answer me this: is not true beauty the skill of man’s own creation?

For hundreds, nay, thousands of years, I have witnessed the revolutions of fortune’s wheel, held against the fires of political upheaval, survived the ravages of war with nary a scratch to my visage. For centuries I waited for you to retrieve me from a watery grave.

From horse-drawn chariots to carriages drawn by themselves, I have seen your kind tumble in vice and ascend once more upon wondrous inventions.

Tell me, are not the great steel-birds of your own design more worthy than those dirty, transient creatures? You say they are of a special species, a rare genus that will soon be gone from this world.

I see a grain of sand in an ocean of endless forms more beautiful. Fickle, fragile things, apt to die if you love them so. Better to resign such attachments now; do not sully your brief life with the sorrow of loss.

Human, for all your ingenuity, you can be so foolish.

There is only one truth worthy of your reverence: the enduring beauty of the eternal. O, Human! Am I not that, the epitome of your image, the perfect being?

Then why do you turn away, and look at them instead?

Why must you cling to the beauty of that which will perish?