Poetry for Abraham Lincoln (Bronze)

bronzes never speak

By Jim Coppoc

their stories carried

instead by the slope

of their body, the hint

of hidden words

on cold metal

lips

a man, now dead

some hundred fifty

years, is cast with

eyes open.  he

watches with

the patience of

winter

light comes, shadows

vanish, light vanishes,

shadows come

in the evening,

the shadows are thicker

bronze man must

contemplate this,

because it is all he

has to contemplate

his eyes frozen

forever on the same

stretch of wall

his gaze interrupted

only by students

as they pass

and their children

and their children’s

children

until at last

some lonely soul

pauses to gaze

back

sees reflections

in bronze man’s eyes

of all the light and all

the shadows of all

the days gone by

and finds solace

in the passing of time

the ebb and flow

of generations

the sacred and

eternal cycle

that binds all

flesh

and leaves behind

only memory,

history, the slope

of a bronze body,

the sculptor just

a name on a

placard

the hint

of hidden words

on cold metal lips

never needing

to be spoken