Etched in Stone
And the tunnels, forgotten rivers, and labyrinths below
Quickly berry season was over. The sun, blinding in the morning, was simply punishing by 11am. Ivy set out for the forest then. The hardest part was just walking in the sun before she could enter Druid Hill Park. She mostly kept her eyes on the ground as she walked. It was hot. Not hot girl summer. Just “Hot Summer.”
In the airy shelter of the forest—humidity and all, her skin a wet surface of sweat—there was relief. A cooling breath over perspiration. The sound of cicadas swelled, then released. Just a few birds sleepily tweeting far spaced out chirps. It felt muffled here. Peaceful.
In the garden made of tombstones, she had also noticed leaves on the ground. Some peach-yellow-orange fall leaves! How strange. The very first ones, even though they were nowhere near the half way point to summer yet. Why were they falling? Was it the lack of rain?
The forest made the extreme summer heat more bearable, but not entirely bearable. (She had spent more days this week drawing in the basement of a mildew smelling overgrown house, she thought was abandoned, until the last time she went there she heard some rustling noses above like very slow walking, perhaps.)
So she made her way back out of the forest, down country like lanes and back up alleys, into her neighborhood, wandering for somewhere else to retreat to.
On the street she had noticed cobblestone, exposing itself under tar, an older road abandoned and cut off. And heard the rush of a river. She peered deep into the gutter, letting her eyes adjust and saw a surprisingly well made brick tunnel.
Broken glass sparkled, held together by plastic, while plastic smashed and lay cradled in broken road. Lines appeared everywhere, cracks in everything, and sometimes patched back together, not by gold, but with cement.
She decided to take the bus, to go to the downtown library branch. There were so many weeds growing up along the street, everywhere! Lining the roads. More than she had ever notice before. It would be funny, someday, if the weeds just broke up the middle of the road, took all of this over, she thought.
-
Moving through the city, weaving in between slow moving adults, reminded her of the slow moving sound she heard, walking sounds, in the house she had thought was deserted.
It’s best to just keep your head down. Mind your own business. Ivy told herself, it was too humid now, always threatening to rain but never raining, to wander in the woods. Thats what she told herself. It wasn’t true. And she didn’t want to think about it. But there had been an incident in January. The mounds of overgrown trees, some sections of the park were turning into wasteland, overgrown sections, no one seemed to notice, just storm clouds on the horizon, but she had noticed how the mounds had increased. Children-sized mounds, actually, in a line. While at the same time children had been going missing, in her neighborhood. And then just before there was any panic, returning.
She didn’t like to let herself remember that now, but sometimes, it was hard to say why or what exactly, it was part of a growing discomfort she had been feeling in that section of the woods, that kept her from sleeping there, overnight, anymore.
The mounds eventually grew taller. Maybe she had imagined it. It just got spooky sometimes, how everything was so overgrown, It seemed to be getting worse and worse. It was weird too how there wasn’t any vines in the graveyard headstone maze section. Where someone had created a little wild garden. Made with left over headstones. Then abandoned that too. The wood forms they had created were rotting. No one replaced the notebook in the bench. One day it was just gone. But it felt safer there, somehow. The stones on each side of her as she entered this section, some had been carved, fresh stones with fresh words. Beautiful. Artists sometimes have a fancy for something and transform a space, never to return to it.
Mind your own business. What a weird thing to be carved into stone!!!
Then with a jolt the bus shook her awake, and she realized she had been dreaming. What a weird thing! She had missed her stop though, not too far it, but past the library. She was over by the courthouse and Lexington street. Strange she never comes here. She thought she would go look at the monument, the cobble stone street there, and read the plague. Sometimes you need notice the things all around you. And sometimes you decide to look at them.
At the base of the monument was a door.
And then she was suddenly surround by a mass of people, a parade? Cheering, she was being pulled by people—transparent cheering people—a ghost parade? all around her. No, it was ivy spinning all around her, and she was like a top being covered in vines, it was a love song. There was a girl. Mary. Mary Gold. She woke up.
Lets go. Again, another dream? Awaken again in an underground tunnel this time. And a person who seemed like her age, her size, reaching out, a friendly hand. A whisper. “Come with me”.
- - -
Ivy, in a dream of a ghost celebration of the past, had passed through one of the doors, down into the world below.
The four griffins on each corner, of the Baltimore Battle Monument, guard a treasure. Each of the four huge black doors, of this tomb. Opening one leads underneath into the master tunnel that connects to the labyrinth running underneath the city.
———
Nothing
Is written in stone
Osiris
The green skinned god
Green for a reason
death, life again
Plant Matter
She, emblem of a city
Lady Baltimore
Carved in Italian Marble
Her creator schooled by the most
Important European sculptor
The Battle Memorial of 1814
The first monument of the United Staes,
18 states joined like sticks, stronger
The ribbons of names twined around
To hold them
“by the rockets red glare” a
National anthem written -
Here in Baltimore, the death numbers of this first monument
Seem so small a number
Compared to others
DC fell, and the British thought Baltimore would fall just as easily. It did not.
-
The Baltimore Battle Monument is the oldest stone monument and first public war memorial in all of the United States.
The second oldest monument, ever in the U.S., is the first Washington Monument, which is in Baltimore. (The better known DC Washington Monument is the second one of its kind.)
The largest Fifteenth Amendment (Black Mens Right to Vote) Parade and Celebration of May 19, 1870, (20,000 people) in all of the United States, was celebrated at the Baltimore Battle Monument. Although Maryland didn’t ratify this amendment until the 1973.
The Baltimore Battle Monument Is Extraordinary For Many Reasons:
It commemorates all thirty-nine Baltimoreans who died in the conflict, regardless of their rank. The friezes present the two battles of the defense: Fort McHenry and North Point.
It is considered by some to be the first “Egyptian structure” in America, and its combined use of Egyptian and Classical elements in the design is unusual. The base is particularly Egyptian in its form, with the black doors evoking the quality of a “cenotaph” or sarcophagus. The winged globe on the cornice symbolizes eternity and the flight of time. The column consists of the Classical Roman form of a fasces, or bundle of rods, symbolizing unity.
This monument is the official emblem of the City of Baltimore, having been adopted for the city seal in 1827. For that reason, the image of the Battle Monument is seen everywhere! (City buildings, signs and printed materials)
The Battle Monument and the Washington Monument prompted President John Quincy Adams to toast Baltimore “the Monumental City” in 1827. No other American city had such monuments at that time. To this day, and for this reason, Baltimore is known as “the Monumental City.”
https://chap.baltimorecity.gov/monuments-and-conservation/battle-monument
The monument is topped by an 8 feet tall 2,750 pound Carrara marble statue by Antonio Capellano of a female figure representing the City of Baltimore wearing a crown of victory, holding a laurel wreath in one hand and a ship's rudder in the other. It was hoisted to the top of the column during the middle of the period of construction on the eighth anniversary ceremonies, Defenders Day, September 12, 1822.[4] Colloquially called Lady Baltimore, the statue was relocated to the Maryland Historical Society on October 5, 2013, in order to preserve it from further damage caused by time and nature. It was replaced by a concrete replica.[6] The monument is the oldest stone monument and first public war memorial in the United States.[7]