A Ghost of Low Replies

On the way to Kew,
By the river old and gray,

Bushy Park, Hampton Hill, Richmond-upon-Thames, TW12

Where in the Long Ago
We laughed and loitered so,

Ferry Lane, Kew, Richmond-upon-Thames, TW9

I met a ghost to-day,
A ghost that told of you -

Osterley Park, Isleworth, Hounslow, TW7

A ghost of low replies
And sweet, inscrutable eyes

Richmond Park, Richmond-upon-Thames, TW10

Coming up from Richmond
As you used to do.

From William Ernest Henley’s On the Way to Kew

Bullies Planning to Overrun the City

His camera, held at weed level, shows us weeds close-to, shoving up their saw-toothed leaves through a crack in the pavement and, at a distance back in the same frame, Atlanta’s skyscrapers on the rise too, proliferating and more rampant than weeds. Skyscrapers rear up like bullies planning to overrun the city, or running the city, from on high.

William Eggleston's Untitled, Miami, Florida

He moves about the skylines of Miami, Atlanta, Pittsburgh. No last drop of humanity could come from what we’ve built as fortifications. He tests it with a view of the Texas State Book Depository in Dallas, indelible in the world’s memory as the source of the gunshots that killed President John F. Kennedy.

Eudora Welty’s introduction to William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest (1989)

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

John Martin's Apocalypse, Tate Britain, Pimilco, Westminster, SW1P

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Mike Leigh's Naked (1993)

Morn came and went–and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread

Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952)

Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light…

Bill Callahan's Apocalypse (2011)

From Lord Byron’s Darkness (1816)