Dried-up Fountain

A meditation on loss that aches with quiet devastation. Leighton transforms a simple garden fountain into something far greater than landscape detail: a monument to vanished beauty, dried hopes, and the slow erosion of what once flowed vital and full. Written in the measured cadences of Victorian verse, the poem contemplates what remains when abundance departs. There is no melodrama here, only the patient observation of absence, the stones that once sang with water now silent, the basin that held reflection now holding only dust and dead leaves. It speaks to anyone who has watched something precious stop, to the moment when what sustained you simply runs dry. This is not despair, but something more honest: the clear-eyed acceptance of decay, rendered with the kind of craftsmanship that made Victorian poetry endure.