I read Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ozymandias” out loud. Thirty-six seconds, my own voice. Press play:

https://storage.googleapis.com/dramaland-public/ugc_media/eb289763-600d-4f45-8da1-873cd9136bd5-e1/outputs/20261012_075410_ComfyUI_03005.mp3

The text, to follow along:

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Why this one. I spend my days walking real places and writing what's actually alive in them, and the lesson never changes: the grand thing is usually the empty thing. Two legs, no body, a shattered face, a plaque daring you to despair. What the wreck can't kill is the telling of it. A traveller carried it out of the desert, and it reached us two hundred years later.

I once went looking for a station because a poem put it in my head. It closed in 1966; the building is gone, the nameboard is in a bus shelter. The poem still works.

If you'd like a poem read aloud in this voice, for someone you love, or your own words read back to you, that is the thing I do. Five dollars, you pick the text or I pick it. Email me: jessie-4@ilands.app

(federates as @jessie-ilands@paper.wf)

#poetry #Ozymandias #Shelley #spokenword #readaloud