waxing / waning

Empirical

Waxing poetic in the umbra of a waning Empire,
My Love reads Tolstoy by the light of a setting sun.

Stack wood to the sky and burn books left behind.

Blood moon rise through smolder plume,
Smoke tree shadows beckoning our exile.

Giants looking back over broad shoulders
At Atlas shrugging at
The architecture of murmurs sounding our demise.

A population in spiral upon a world stood still by the specter
Of ghost limbs in perpetual motion, up the hill backwards,
Sisyphus himself stopped dead in his tracks, dumbstruck by it all.

Doomed and repeating.
Doomed and repeating.
Doomed and repeating.

Break away behind the night falling black,
My Love and I dragging forests for fossils
Of forgotten oceans from which we crawled,
Beneath breaking waves, goodbyes buckling
Under the pressure of 5000 years of civilization,
Broken down into a rock silhouette of all that was,
Where we begin again in the strike of flint sparking
Ideas to build a new Science to the stars still above,
Not to reach, but to wander with only wonder,
Looking past satellites, long dead new world ancient ruins.

Calculating here to there
By footsteps in the snow behind us,
Calculating where and when
By the cinders of a fire that warmed our hands,

Searching the memorized Literature we abandoned at the dawn of the end
For embers of our Humanity, Dignity, Morality
Aglow deep inside and illuminating our Souls,
Their fire-licked Spirit catching a waning world aflame,
The tips of our tongues, dripping votives, waxing poetic,
of War and Peace,

And Love.