Kataklysmos

By Hal Beddoe

When all is dead and gone,

The beds of the sea shall rise again,

And ashen soil will turn to dust,

In the last days of a dying star.

Humanity left long ago,

But in her twighlight hours,

She left neither ruin nor pillars,

Nor a soul to remember she was here.

How reading flowered as great men fell,

The great fells once glaced with peaks of ice,

Have since worn away to nothing at all,

Six billion years since water welled.

And in these final days,

Find the stillmost place at the quietest moment,

You’ll see my shadow, my forever omen,

An echo of what I was, 

Living on as the last in God’s dominion,

Even when all here is dead and gone.

Image by Alexis Pressa via Unsplash