THE TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS NEAR EPHESUS

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
OZYMANDIAS - Shelley

At first, the sign is difficult to find.
The third Wonder of the Ancient World
Is hidden beyond a dusty car park
Large enough for five or six chariots.
Blocking the view, three abrupt notice boards.
Below, a lone teetering stone column 
Stacked on a quaking base fashioned from scraps.
Next to it a discarded treadless tyre
With an expectant pole thrust through its heart
As if fellow worn-out tyres will be piled
To build a rubber, rival monument.
And on a slab, once of a great wonder,
An alien peach left by a stranger -
One would like to think as an offering.
The public is across the barren fields,
Centuries away, trying to picture
Ephesus without the cafés and stalls.
But back here in this deserted wasteland
It’s simpler to add to the dry landscape
Than do the crowd's effortful subtraction.
To add the pillaging and the earthquakes,
The dumb arson and the hopeful rebirth.
To ponder the worshipful erections
To an earth mother and a cold virgin;
The strange, contradictory, Artemis.
Though once a wonder of the ancient world,
Her temple’s stone fragments neglected now;
Perhaps that leftover peach, with a core
Of an enceinte stone of a different kind,
When nurtured by the virgin earth mother,
Will enter the untouched surrounding soil
And grow to be a wonder of the world.