"The Dust" A Poem about a dying world

 

From the ground we came and to the ground we'll return.

There has been a collapse in the cities while extant souls endure a rapid burn.

It was only a brief wait for the beginning of the rest, demands for vanishing resources, reawakenings of the oppressed.

I am certain that we are now moving from the last fragment of light.

There's a writing in the sky that concludes our future and flames abominably bright.

It was as if these last few centuries built up this moment here,

we all were making our lives while time was creating this dead frontier.

Allow me to introduce myself.

I am a figure of this present curse.

I can tell of those who have spent their labor hurting and blessing in the last few moments of our piece of the universe.

First it was the crops,

then it was our breath.

These invisible poisons spread in the skin and the land causing silence, bringing death.

Monuments to love and hate were  broken to men and women's desire.

The hidden corners were shared by the weak and the reason of spirit, civilization, was burned by the shattered in one long fire.

We thought we had moved past illness, outlawed untimely pain.

Those before us had suffered so that we could do better for our children, breaking suffering's chain.

But this meaning for sunlight had vanished.

Sunlight was just playing a cruel joke on our heads.

Many struggled through flesh and wreckage, flew through our twilight, while abandoning meaningless words, leaving them unsaid.

Our right to continue this story had been stopped in mid-sentence it seemed.

It was easier to forget the past and close out the future while discarding past and present dreams.

Breath was exhaled of many dead futures as it drained from lungs and minds.

Lying in wait for darkness, that's how it turned out that nature and fate had designed.

I fear it's too much to hope for that reversal of destiny can come to pass.

It's a trial of the worst of us quite frankly, that the rest of us are made to suffer in this short eternity of a trap.

But as long as I breathe with the memory of a knowledge that will soon fade from collective view, my mind is still sharp and I can guarantee that my witness is true.

Had we forgotten the memory of those years before who'd  been buried, it might've made it easier to understand.

But nobody had learned from the dead and the buried.

Sorrow and ignorance had become the reigning demand.

I tried to tell those after me what we had gone through many decades before, some who joined in our echoes, but there were screams, curses and warnings of war.

Distractions were in the eyes, heart and face as well as phenomenal rage.

The inevitable became that much closer, man against woman, race against race.

It made it all that much easier for the young to go first, then the old, then the strong.

It wasn't going to be a question of if but the fury of waiting and the notes of the dying's song.

As it slid by, there was no food and a silencing of the debates.

The loudest voices became soft whispers then silence, radio silence, as I remember the phrase.

But you see, I'm remembering too many phrases of no particular consequence from my past and childhood years.

Time has wound down and I don't have any further sorrow.

I've  cried out all my tears.

There will be no more fourth, fifth chances or births of joy or despair, only disappearance of feeling and obsolescence of prayer.

There are few things left for me to remember and say.

I think it's time to finish this archive, just words on the dust, and call it a day.