The sun went misty grey
and ice never departed,
and the harvests failed
as the ash hung like a
death shroud across the
turning stupefied world,
and prayers went unanswered,
and the crops lay down
in fields of frost and famine
that walked the roads of
every land of the known
and the unknown world.

Then came the monster
dispensing eternal judgement,
swollen, silent, and black,
counting out its millions
taken quickly in the dark,
and the order of things,
so long trusted, decayed into
a long unlit forgetting,
in this time that changed the
face of generations to come.

This is not a story closed,
a curiosity sealed in some
hidden vault for dusty historians
to wrangle about and conjure theories,
but is a window looking on
to a species, still soft,
still breathing on a
thin and tilting crust that
can take as it gives at any time,
and is larger than human desire.

For all our spectacle and
our knowing, and our claims we
can predict the winds, we are but
creatures of a moving blue stone
that feeds us and could fold us back
into its unending silence without
grief or warning, fashion us as
fossils on a fragile and beloved earth
under the gaze of the not-yet-born.

 

3/6/2026