Poems IX

Dark poems for dark days. 

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction.  In fact, it always both flames up and smoulders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view.

-Ivo Adnric, The Bridge on the Drina

There once was a world
Filled with beautiful girls
Old castles and marvelous things

Like bridges and songs
Blue skies and white swans
Rivers and mountains and seas

There were churches and bells
Heavens and Hells
Men who would die to be free

Yet these men were slain
And the world did sway
Away from a beautiful peace

And just like before
The demons of war
Emerged like a fatal disease

So the bridges and songs
Were forgotten and bombed
And Hell on Earth did man see

Upon dark shores they stood in wait
Men of Hell and wreckage
When Heaven fell, the horsemen reigned
And sealed the Earth in carnage

Little by little
While Death plays the fiddle
Humanity sinks into the tomb

Men stand aghast
Before their hideous past
Their screams are melodious tunes 

They are buried alive
The earth muffles their cries
And the world begins anew

Civilizations arise
Civilizations despise
And fiddle in hand Death doth loom

I have seen the future in Pompeii
Where bodies lie in casts
The eruption of Vesuvius
Has turned Pompeii to ash

So too the last of men shall perish
And weep in desperate mourning
For the civilization that he burned
For the planet he is burning

He will beg for bygone eras
He will gasp for air to breathe
In the night of a nuclear winter
He will pray for a day of spring

Yet nonetheless the ash will fall
The ash will fall like snow
Like he who gazed into Medusa’s eyes
His world shall turn to stone

The Last Day of Pompeii, Karl Brullov