The Dying Sun

There are men who have heard this speech before,
listened to the windchimes clanking in the storm,
And when the voice is mortal,
they listen and they laugh.

But when the voice is from beyond,
intoning from the sea,
to laugh is to hide the fact
that they resist the urge to flee.

When the songs come from the west,
across the mountains made of man,
the blazing fire that gives us life
engulfs the world at evening time,
and disappears the life of living --
the blinking stutter that was man
is gone again,
is dust again,
Walt Whitman was not wrong:
to feel the death beneath my knees,
to quiver in the evening heat,
to feel the sweat and thunder of the jets:
The age of man, and
dawn proceeds the dusk.

Doomsday makes its inevitable, crushing progress,
grinding ever closer to the real.

It is then that I can sing with glee;
it is then that I can dance in the street;
it is when I find that life is gone,
I see my shadow outlined in the red
stretched out across the land;
that is when I find myself,
and then I cease to be.

The little boy laughs as I fall to the ground,
and I can stare, unblinking, into the dying sun.