All along the Western rim they built barriers
Dark Towers and bales of barbed wire
Pikes from sharpened sticks hammered into the earth
Broken glass strewn among the reeds and in the hollows
Its armies clung to a skirt of night
Traveling along the horizon, just out of reach of the dawn
Overrunning all the little towns and keeps
It swept them away and even their flakes of dust
Death stood still beyond the peaks
Death stood poised to flee
Death stood frightened and silent
Death stood weeping at the end of it
First the amphibians and then the reptiles
began to die
Then others died
all the creatures fleeing, died
and the small children wailed and died
then their parents died the most harrowing deaths
and seabirds died
the fish too
and all the deep creatures spawned in the long ago,
they died
The trees and grasses died
And the bees died
Even the granite had come to die, but couldn't
The stars spinning at the rim of the coal sack shivered
because the land was barren, flattened and scorched,
stung to dust beneath its gases,
arid and endless, white as the pale horse
