(no subject)

[apiphile]

you can hate whatever you hate but your flesh is still flesh

A world war is coming.
I can feel it the way starlings
flying in fighter formation
in the unsettled air above me
feel the oncoming storm;
but unbirdlike, I long for it
not because I fear it will end me
but because I dream that it will.
Although I have seen with my own eyes,
more confirmation of war's horrors
than any uninvolved observer
far from the battlefields
than any generation before me;
even though I cannot claim to be ignorant
of the way a body looks when everything
including hope
is taken from it by others.
I long for it the way the shipwrecked
yearn for the tsunami,
the way the stranded pray for the blizzard,
the way the morphined cancerous whisper guilty come-ons
to the squeezing, terrible hand of death:
in contravention of the terror,
in the face of the peptidal compulsion
screaming LIVE in every cell
as unthinking as ice forming
on a winter puddle.

A better world is coming on the far side of death.
It will worm its way through decaying bones
and the sad, shallow graves of the last survivors,
and the scattered bands who bear the scars of memory,
will find new ways to flourish
in the cataclysms of tomorrow;
the chrysalid is not the revolution:
that honour falls to the bursting white heads
that rise through graveyards
and sprinkle the ashes of our final Holocausts
with the seeds of unknown tomorrows.

Comments

[kat_lair]

Too relatable. The opening line about the starlings really got me. Hope is still hope even if it isn't personal, I guess.

[apiphile]

There's a book my friend recommended called "Scatter and Adapt", about life after... well, the worst. About how that's what humanity's always done, and how the species is pretty unlikely to go extinct any time evolutionarily soon. He said he found it soothing (I find it disappointing to think of, but we have different goals), to know that something would likely go on, even if we will likely not.