like broken charcoal scratched into the horizon dancing atop white-hot embers
the skyline only broken by a one-legged piano, toppled to its side and burning;
the flames carve between each key, black and white and red spitting out strings
they engulf the crippled form, when a crack of thunder beats the heavy humid air
- a loud pulse ripples through the sky, a warning shot that heaven may tear in two
and the earth will crumble into dust anchored into damnation below the God-fury.
Over the hill, under the looming torment, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand bodies lay
still and cold and pale, rotting gently. Their rib cages rattle, shaking left and right,
bones audibly cracking and snapping in the desperate struggle to break out before
it is too late and the long sharp swift blade, sprouting from a pole held by bone;
white and clean, wrapped in loose black silk; slowly sweeps across the land
overloaded by Father's wrathful outburst, blazoned into the earth and scorn into
the field of dead; the piano slumps to its belly, losing the last leg and a note moans,
the rib cages groan and with the final pluck of muscle snapping, a thousand chests
burst open and unleash a dainty dreary mass of sun-white shinning silhouettes
turning the sky black by contrast and the void-grass blacker still, blind to the eye.
Death's long reach harvests the golden grain, loading the shimmering outlines
of man into the jaws, crushing against the gate, piling up. The metal bars of the gate
bend, threatening to bust, under the weight. The heavens open and the tears of every
angels weep; sodden the earth - a rainbow shines, puddles grow, droplets splash
about a dove's feather, eye-white, in wet soot, bare branches and crisp brown leaves.
A man, rope about his waist and a large drum hanging from his side, walks -
stick in hand, toward the white field. Death looms closer, creeping under the storm.
A woman, holding the neck of a guitar slung over her shoulder, walks -
fist clenched, toward the white field. Death looms closer, creeping forward still.
A child kneels into the dirt, lifts the soft - still warm - feather from the wet soot
scoring lines of black across a crisp brown leaf, like ink drying into paper,
symbols, notations and scrawl scribe across the charred veins of the leaf, then rolling
into a scroll of sheet music, sealed by thumb and finger; held to the quick beating
at a chest, toward the white field. Death arrives and sees a wall of three figures
like shepherds of light standing guard against the growling wolf of darkness.
Death pulled a fiddle
and plucked out a riddle
to query a mortal in song
The man starting drumming
the woman was strumming
the boy and the field of dead
were all humming to the song
of the sky and the hymn
of the earth and the clouds
clashed loud and the angels all
sung to the dead leaf's scrawl
Bones clinched loud
silk swayed in the wind
each string screamed out
as the field was thinned
Together they played
and together they sung
until the field was empty
and a new day had begun.
