lady rust

Beloved Lady Rust,

You perplex me. How your beauty is defined with your chocolate-colored pelt of crusty, flaky, aged quality, and how patches peel to unfold the tarnished element beneath. How the strongest fall prey and succumb to the creeping, contemplating, patient caress of your prowess, slowly by age and tenderly by weather. How you disregard my sheath of robust sheen, and crack it open in your own time.

You are an equalizer, unyielding and persistent. Your perseverance infects and entangles even the most sturdy and proud. Weaving and wafting through the fabric of matter, bonding and reacting, changing and recreating the untarnished to the matured, the supple and smooth to the aged and textured. You impart warmth and character to the otherwise detached and frigid. You ripen the surface to show an inherent weakness, creating folds and creases where there used to be none, fashioning me into a myriad of valleys and peaks, of trenches and outcrops.

You strip me of my pride, forcing me to yield and thus inducing my dissolution. You extract a history I long to keep hidden; and by an utter lack of discrimination, prove that like all things, I too must falter, that I too have an end, an Achilles’ heel. You are my Delilah, as you cut your way through my falsely impervious skin, peeking beneath my stature to reveal the latent senescence within me. Slowly, affectionately, you make me new by rendering me old.

I become the evidence of your presence, the metastasizing fibrosis of a time I cannot will to deny. That I, too, am subject to passing, and will one day fall into oblivion and obsolescence. I am under your whims, and may you make do with my body as you have done for countless others before me. You are no hunter, nor am I hunted. You are simply my salvation. My deliverer.

Take me, piecewise and layer by layer. And destroy what industry and man have made out of my ore and core. Return me into the earth that I have longed for, and pined for, for so long. I am at your mercy, my Lady in Red. Create from this gloss and glib the ashes of my deliverance, the nature of my origins, the truth that I am part of the earth, and by your gentle hands will return to it.

I am yours.

Sincerely,

The Chained Irons

This was written as an entry to Jessica Zafra's The Weekly LitWit Challenge 6.5: Make Rust Beautiful. Which, sadly, I did not win. However, being slightly conceited and all, I'm posting my entry here as it does reflect my nuances and literary dispositions. It is a quandary on the capacity of something so essentially destructive, in this case rust, as an object of beauty. The original post is here.
The original image is from here.