Erich von Hungen – The Found Artifact

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It is an artifact

as patinaed, dusted, chipped,

as stained and incomplete

as any ancient shard an archeologist might find,

this, this song I leave you.

For only in the making and the finding

of the music, not in the singing of it, itself,

is the song, this artifact,

whole, without disconnect,

without the broken-lipped stone

statue on a distant beach.

There may be beauty, true,

in galleries and museums

but they are just the leavings,

filed and rasped away

from the original, that moment

that comes before, that sees farther

than that simple frozen view.

The curves, the symmetry, the balance,

the color and the rest is not and

never will be the thing itself.

It, all that, is a commemoration,

a memory of that moment.

Beauty,

this thing above these steps

and tracks, above these shadows,

remains those memories found now

discovered in my opened hand.