Unremembered

Yesterday we stumbled upon Apollonia Salbake, and as I learned about it, I realised how completely time has forgotten this place.

Forgotten walls.

Forgotten graves.

Forgotten history

Stone walls that fell with the last earthquake,

lifted, carried away, reused,

set into other buildings

that do not remember

what they replaced.

People forgot the tears.

Forgot the laughter that once moved

between these hills.

Forgot the weight of hands

pressing farewell into carved rock.

Only a few names remain,

cut into stone

with such certainty.

Names that only scholars pronounce now,

carefully,

as if speaking them too loudly

might disturb a silence

that has already erased them.

A few coins were found.

The faces on them

have no names left.

They lie in museums

where visitors drift past glass

without seeing

the vanished market,

the vanished hands,

the vanished ambition.

The women who once held a place here,

who stood with more visibility

than in other kingdoms,

who were named, honoured, remembered

in stone and ceremony,

are now only faint letters

softened by centuries.

Their authority did not survive the dust.

Their presence did not survive the forgetting.

Even the trees are gone.

The ones planted for shade,

for fruit,

for hope of continuation.

No root marks the ground.

No trunk leans into the sky.

No leaf trembles with inherited memory.

The hill does not testify.

The wind does not retell.

This is not a ruin that longs.

Not a city waiting to be rediscovered.

It is abandonment so complete

that not even the past

remembers being here.

Apollonia Salbake

is not silent.

It has been

unremembered.