The Waiting

This poem won first place in a national poetry contest this year.

When the Voice first spoke into the heart of Night;

And the first cold hues of chaos swept the sky.

When Time went tumbling out of the deepless dark

And the curtain of the blackness fell apart.

One moment was enough to see the dream

Something too calm and awful to be seen,

A wild, wordless whisper of a song

That bound the ages till the end should come.

The music entered all eternity

And broke its way into infinity

The newborn Light went out and lit the Sun

The Voice alone saw all that was to come.

And long before the making of the curse,

Before the first blood stained the firstborn earth,

It spoke in silence deep within the Night,

The End will come and all will be made right.

This age is ending - God calls home the stars,

The world is plagued with great and little wars

The dying sun is swollen, dim and red,

And things that once were good and green are dead.

We watch the evening twilight fade away,

The ancient earth is weary, old and gray.

The fire has spread across the earth’s dark plains,

The broken world will never be the same.

Now all the living things have shrunk and withered

The mountains tremble and the pale sky shivers

A wind has come from off the northern seas

A storm from hell to shake the shuddering trees.

The thunder of God’s wrath is drawing near

We close our eyes in hopes that we might hear,

In starry hollows long forgot and gone,

The music of that wild, wordless song.

But nothing rises from the deep abyss

No sound of music splinters this silence

We are too deep in blood and treachery

To hear the voiceless breath of ecstasy.

We are the only living ones that know

The curse - tremendous joy, tremendous woe.

Despair is rising like an evil mist

We never dreamed that it would come to this.

And all the summer stars are dim with tears

For all the shattered hearts through all the years

They fade like autumn flowers in the snow

That sink to sunless depths that no man knows.

The raging sea looks up beyond the sky

And lifting up his broken voice he cries,

‘Oh God of Stars, when will you make an end?

When will the judgment of the world begin?

‘Beyond all sundered seas made dark with sorrow

Beyond the sunken shadow of tomorrow

What mercy will we find beneath the sun,

When all is done and said, and said and done?’

And do you think that heaven ever hears

The wail of broken hearts and human tears?

The voices that are shrieking in the night

The stifled whispers of the murdered light.

Has God reversed the cycle of the world

And sent it hurling backwards to the void?

The anguish of existence does not end

We fail and hope and live to fail again.

And shall we somewhere find at close of day

A place to wash all memories away?

But there are things the world cannot forget

And there are things the heart cannot forgive.

The earth is plunging through the pathless void

The Dark is taking hold of the entire world.

And hearts that never wavered split and break

Still screaming that it should not be this way.

The sky above is sickening with fear,

The face of Time is stained with bloody tears

And everywhere we turn we look on Death -

We realize now that we have nothing left.

But deep beyond the barricade of fear

Within the thunder of the storm we hear,

The Voice that called us from the heart of Night

The End will come and all will be made right.