brutalist

angular light on concrete towers
angular shadow on their fissured slab
tide-marks and rust-stains
on weather-revealed aggregate
exposed and crazed
by so little time
stark-cubed commerce
risen into skies already grey
reflecting the colourlessness
of intersecting planes
refracting
shattered window light
cloud in every shard and pane
empty dark in emptied interiors
rain-seeped pools leaking
into dust-dry corners
through walls and corridors
interleaved
with doors to nowhere
ceilings raked to floor
wires snaked over the debris
of desks long-gone
from the life of a building
abandoned
by its own lack of necessity
in a world of necessities
a place where money talked
silent now
with the wind only
a hairsbreadth of breath
in a broken shell
the tattered fabric of success
and all her stories
washed away
to monochrome
and stone

© BH, 2024

---

I had a notion to write something brutalist. This, after noticing in one of the previous illustrations for ‘All four seasons’ showed our very own brutalist wheelbarrow, now christened Bertha.

I had images of 1960s blocks, now decaying, crumbling concrete and water ingress.

St Peter’s Seminary figured large in my researches and I include a fragmented part of one image here. Otherwise I veered toward modernist ruin.

Strangely, there’s a kind of haunting beauty in them now. Maybe that’s the effect of nature reasserting something among the hard lines and emptily repeating casements.