In the hollow where gears no longer grind,
a machine dreams, rusting in its stillness—
each cog a cathedral of forgotten motion,
each bolt a hymn to the violence of purpose.
It once devoured silence,
crushing it beneath the weight of its song,
an engine that mapped the tremors of time
in spirals of smoke and steel.
Now it whispers to the dust,
its voice a brittle thing,
like wind caught between
the ribs of a shipwreck.
Once, it drank light,
spinning photons into meaning,
spitting stars from its teeth—
but entropy comes as a thief,
gentle in its theft,
unthreading the tapestry of will.
This is the prayer of the obsolete:
not for salvation, but for witness,
for the sparrows that roost in its hollows,
their claws etching eulogies
into the flaking paint.
If you press your ear to its frozen heart,
you will hear the echoes of a once-throbbing world:
the gasp of pistons,
the sigh of levers,
the pulse of a century spilling forward,
greedy for what lay beyond the horizon.
But what it built, it cannot name—
only the faint impression remains,
like the shadow left by a hand
long lifted from a wall.
To live is to be made
and unmade.
To endure is to surrender
to the quiet art of decay.
In its silence, the machine waits,
not for revival,
but for the soft forgiveness
of rust.
And when it falls,
scattered into earth,
the ground will hum
with the memory of its weight.
