Article voiceover
What heralds a calendar's birth? How is an era measured? What cataclysm, what revelation required to make an age end? Do those who live in empires' fall notice the descent in real time? Can a marker only exist in reflection, a chapter's conclusion only apparent when we turn the last page? ~~ He stirs the coals, seeking heat still from gray embers, surrounded by the ashes of man's folly, no fuel remains to beckon a bright blaze. Raiders will overrun. No signal fire will call arms or spread warning. But the kingdom crumbles because it has already been cannibalized. ~~ It may come poignant as a winter morning, quieted by snow. Thunderous and cleansing as rain blended with tears, quenching not the rage. Effulgent as a biblical angel, querying and queering your faith, or inky and bottomless as the despair of all futility compressed into a single endless night, quelling your heroes' quest: that moment you realize the world we've known is ending. This era, no longer so current, will also wash away in the tides of time, become fragments of melody and memory held in symbols and scraps. Whether ripped from trembling hand or resolutely aided, the page will turn, a new calendar named after the next popular god, and we'll be but enigmatic ghosts, threads of echo with which some future bard will re-story and re-enchant the world.
This piece is part of the Medicinal Poetry series.