Great wall of China for Black and white community

 

I remember the wall not as a monument, but as an effort
a long, rising insistence of stone against gravity and time.

I had come to it already late in history,
late in my own life even then,
and yet the climb demanded something immediate
breath, legs, a quiet negotiation with each step.

The path was steeper than memory now allows,
each incline a question: how far, how much further?
And still I went,
drawn upward along the spine of something ancient
that refused to lie flat against the earth.

At one turning, I paused
and looked not ahead, but back through the wall itself,
through a broken line of battlements
framing distance like an afterthought.

What I captured was not the wall,
but its echo
stone looking at stone,
time observing itself receding.

Thirty years have thinned the air of that moment,
but the image remains:
a steepness, a silence,
and the quiet astonishment
of having once stood inside history
and looked down.

Canon 20D 

EF 200mm f2.8 L

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