A Glimpse of the Apocalypse

The sacred heights where snowy quiet slept

Have softened into sorrow, stone, and clay;

The ancient frost that guarded peaks has wept,

And turned the living mountain face away.

​Along the floor where narrow torrents wound,

We drove our iron spikes and poured our greed,

We hollowed out the belly of the ground

To feed a distant, never-sated need.

​Then broke the gorge—no gentle warning bell,

No mercy from the heavens, fierce and grey—

A roaring tide of mud and soot from hell

Swept all our fragile world of steel away.

​It crushed the bridge, it tore the hillside raw,

It drowned the humming engines in the deep;

And kneeling down before unyielding law,

The valley had no tears left now to weep.

​Where are our brethren who had done no wrong?

The gentle hands that tilled the terraced loam,

The silent laborer whose shift was long,

The weary pilgrim walking toward his home?

​Their desperate cries were swallowed by the roar,

Choked out in darkness by the slurry’s weight;

No temple bell could reach that churning shore,

No prayer could turn the falling wheel of fate.

​The prayer flags flutter, ragged in the cold,

Above a barren, unrecognizable bed;

The price of pride, by distant masters sold,

Is counted in the quiet of our dead.

​Yet in the stillness where the river ran,

A darker truth outlives our transient breath:

The earth endures beyond the reign of man,

Indifferent to his monuments and death.

​Rest now, lost souls, beneath the shifting silt—

For living eyes, the reckoning has begun:

This shattered gorge reveals the world we built,

A grim foretelling of the days unborn.

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