The ground

I stood upon the ground where they had been,

among the fallen stones and dark timbers,

and dreamt of life as they had known it once;

now gone, all broken, dispossessed around,

as detritus and ruin of a home once loved.

So did my ancestors still speak through rubble

and whisper dreams in ever-spreading dust.

There was no trace of life as they had lived,

mementos gone and attributes of being, all

carried off, or broken where they stood by

driven days and yearning years, held up in

mortal months where lack of human hand

decreed, they could not last and hold their

shape, no matter how much one may wish.

Cobbled into being through the mind and

heart, scrabbled from the ebb and flow of 

dregs, imagined shape of something now

long disappeared, was all which could be

summoned from the screed past did fling

in casual summons at my feet; daring me

to bring back what was irrevocably lost.

Only in the whims and dreams of fancy

can we recreate our history, and even 

then it holds no true form beyond poor

imagining and futile yearning, for what

is gone is always gone, unless it lives

eternal in a place beyond this jigsaw of

material, and for that, there is no proof.

https://dversepoets.com/2017/10/12/chaucerian-stanza-or-rhyme-royal/