Revisionist Poetry – “The Small Guardian” – Bargain Store Gargoyle, v.2

Why are we drawn to gargoyles,
those stone monsters
perched on cathedrals and towers,
leaning over us
as if listening?

Their warped mouths,
their fierce and weathered faces,
hold our gaze.
We imagine the lives
they have witnessed,
the old weather they have endured,
the silence they keep.

Then, in a bargain store’s dusty corner,
I find one reduced to hand size:
an ersatz concrete gargoyle,
a shabby echo
of the great originals.

It would not last
through frost or flood,
yet it still carries
the old power to arrest the eye.
In its blunt little weight
there survives
that ancient spell:

the feeling that stone
can remember,
that watchfulness
can take shape,
that even a cheap replica
may guard a threshold.