Ashes

How would you know which stories are true

If the telling is filled with lies and deceit?

How would you know which views to pursue

If knowledge is partial and never complete?

 

She says she reads legends from a time long ago

When magical beings lived in plain sight;

In forests and glades with buck and with roe,

They feasted and drank and killed out of spite.

 

It makes it all bearable – the famines and floods

The Amazon burning and melting ice sheets,

To know there’s a pattern written in blood:

We’re ravaging locusts and never replete.

 

When reading these stories, these legends of old,

Can they tell us what needs to be fought for and taught?

Or are they mere fictions for children retold

And nothing can save us – no Grail, no Camelot.

 

No magical swords, no magical shoes,

No magical words, no deeds that liberate,

No magical love that always renews,

None of that is left and this is our fate.

 

To live in a time where true stories seem false,

Labyrinthine values reveal what we’ve lost –

Demeter despoiled in a desolate waltz

And Gaia’s bled barren, our new holocaust.

 

Perhaps from the ashes a Phoenix will rise

Magically live, show us how to survive,

A beacon of light searing the skies

And hope will return and life gently thrive.