By Chronofus
2nd October 2002
One step, two steps, three steps…no more. I give up, I'm too tired to keep running. I cannot follow you, my sun, any more.
I have no energy left for the long journey west. I lay in your wake, exhausted,
spent, shattered with the realisation my sun has set. Where have you gone, my
light, my warmth, my promise of life?
You have left me here with the growing shadows for company. Shadows on the
land, shadows on my skin, shadows in my soul where your light once had been.
They fall across the ripples of my fears, they radiate out and echo back to
me, whispers of deception, of promise, of dark illusions and shapeless forms
- dreams and nightmares wrapped together in fingers of melting ice cream.
There are hopes and dreams laying cast off next to me. Old clothes, armour,
walls of protection now cast aside in failure. Illusions, fading with the light.
Ghosts, my companions now are ghosts, slipping through my fingers and my thoughts
like the failing sunshine through the trees, leaving nothing now but the coolness
on my skin.
Time, the old enemy, has caught up with me. He rushes past like an evening
storm, flashes of lightning on my black horizon. My sun, my world has spun around
you, and now you have set. I waited too long, moved too slow, let my sun rise
on other horizons on other worlds. My dreams, my steps, heading into the west,
taking me to days end for a long darkened rest.
Sighing, sitting on rocks, feet on clay now muddied with tears. Prometheus,
in thought, chained to his rock, while eagles soar on currents high, leaving
him to think, to carry his burden, his task of Atlas, weighing him down. Heaving,
tired, throwing off his world, to leave its shell shattered on the cosmic ground.
Will the storm of tears drown out the wailing?
Head in hands he returns close to the ground and the wellspring of life rolls
down his face, there to remain. Tracks of dreams, glistening in the darkness.
Prometheus, my mirror, my dream in the clouds, let's bury our head in our fingers
and cover our eyes. Neither of us can believe the world keeps turning.
Crushed to exhaustion, panting flat on the ground, we stare into space. Deepening
to black, shot through with stars, the richness of finality with its bright
pin prick scars. A collection of suns, faded almost to release, they have lain
beyond the light and far beyond our reach.
My fingers reach out to them, tracing their haloed curves, but they are nothing
but reminders of lessons hard learned. Where to from here, from this bed in
the dust, what promise is there left in the time beyond dusk? It's a journey
through darkness where I'm feeling my way over a bare rocky countryside in two
shades of grey.
Here I am alone, crowned by stars even more remote than my sun had been. There
is no strength left for this impossible task, but like a lemming I'll still
leap at the last, and fall into oblivion while the wind whistles past to the
ground below, ready to embrace me in its clasp. I am subsumed by the earth,
still alone, though I am not the first to be touched by the sun and left feeling
cursed; to be lifted so high and yet left feeling so much worse.
The night deepens like a cool stiffening breeze, leaving me shivering. It's
only dew forming on my face, they are not tears of memories of a light I can't
replace. It covers like a blanket the whole of the land, no one could cry so
much. I don't understand.
It flows from me - life giving blood. It drowns everything but me in its sorrowing
flood. It's too late I realise with a thud, I have turned my world into torrents
of mud, sweeping me away into lakes of depression, future homes of fossilised
memories. Millions of years to lie in state, compressed by time to a stony countenance.
A skeleton of hope to a past long since gone.
Somewhere from the east will rise hope. Resurrection. A blooming of springtime
with rainbows and flowers. Eden in sunlight, bathed and cleansed, growing every
second with the promise of life. But all that rises now from the iron wall of
the horizon is a pale reflection of my vanished sun. It glows with stolen light,
mocking me with its brilliance and changing colours in the deepness of the evolving
night. The shadows of my despair mirrored in the shadows on its face, but like
me it too keeps another face for the dark.
My moon - my silvered moon; my yellow moon; my blood red and blue moon; we
dance here together in the shadows of a fallen world. You light my eyes with
your pale reflection. There is no colour in our world but yours. It's a mournful
dance we make across our grey world. There is no comfort in your touch, no warmth,
no promise of growth, and yet at least we move together across the sky, dance
steps in the wake of our vanished sun. You are now all I can see. You bring
back memories of the light reflected in your eyes. This dance is not meant to
last, to linger in dreams long past, we have fallen hard and fast, and now we
both watch the horizon for a sign of things to come. You have kept me through
the night, from falling away, and now I have no gift to give you.
You have given me, fair moon, hope that my sun shall rise soon. And to you
is left the night, another night of weeping souls. Faces turned to you in loss,
in prayer, in hope, sharing your dream that one day you will shine too.
Through the colouring dawn, it is for you now that I mourn. You stand behind,
hands on my back. It is you who push me forward, into the future, into the warming
touch of the rising sun as you vanish, drowned in her brilliance.
The solar day has turned, may this one never end.