My inspiration? Let’s try a weekend watching “The Killing Fields” and some documentary on the thermonuclear bombings in Britain, Japan, and Germany in WWII. The documentary had a poem that also helped. I have to find the poem. Sorry for you diehards Christians out there. If you don’t like it , remember I didn’t force you to read it. In other words. Don’t even think of flaming me!
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
The Future crept stealthily to the Present, engulfing it in endless Tomorrows. Liquid and transient in its coming forth-ward from the unknown and unimaginable – spawning weapons and hatreds unfathomable. It was sure that the promise for a new Tomorrow waned at the close of each passing day. Each new weapon, each blossoming desire to hate and destroy exerted a pressure such that would leave both Time and Existence in smoldering ashes.
Some people preferred to call it the Apocalypse. Others thought of it simply as the flow of life and evolution. All agreed that their days on this Earth were numbered and dwindling. Families were torn apart by insecurities. Nations crumbling under warfare, their leaders possessed by greed. Crime and dissention spread faster than any cancer. Chaos was the God of Gods, and its voice more blasting than the God spoken of on the street corners and in churches.
Smoke from thermonuclear weapons and gas pathogens clouded the sky. Bodies littered the street, and as if an unsetting sun, advancing blazes lit the world all day and night. The dying mingled with the dead, and there were those who sang and wept of righteousness and of salvation – and they lifted their hands to the air and called out in muted voices – and died. And the fat from the erected bodies fueled the fire to burn on. Days and nights came and passed, so monotonous and mangled into each other that they could no long be told apart.
There was no salvation and perhaps their never was. Time knows nothing of mercy, nor does it care. If their were every any Omniscient Being who would descend an outstretched hand to cradle all of those that too held there tiny outstretched hands outward, than that Omniscient One long fled to a dusting memory yet to be forgotten.
The fires have gone out. Nothing moves, there is nothing left to move. Time is liquid – locked in an unseen eternity of ebbing and flowing to a destination and an end, if one even exist -- that none shall ever witness.
© Caroline Alicia Harris