The Rite Of Spring (draft 2)

When finally the terrible ash falls,

And soot-dark hooves pound our crystalline, moon-splintered streets,

As drifting tin asterisks plummet like blinking stars
Puffing mushrooms on the horizon;

Let the Fount of Knowledge live, and its darker children pass.

I will not mourn.
When the rhythms of the New World break apart,
And the rhythms of the deep Earth crack and start,
When the Sun is

watch, compass, match,
And the dogs of older days all devolve to feral hounds,
And the highways grow like deserts, and the shrubs reclaim the roads,
Letting lichen stumble freely onto project and penthouse alike,
She lashes out in equitable totality, Earth,
And wills her skin grown back,
Where we once peeled it away.
Then all the people will be scattered
And each minute like a leaf that falls, uncounted,

while dirt coats our tongues like smoke the world.
And all of our bleak treachery, our base treason
That has scarred and eviscerated,

will dissolve without a flourish.

Spring may be near enough, but our Winter will be rough,
and our diet one of rawness: roots and wild meat.
Our eyes will hone and sharpen, and our feet will weather black,
Our bones will weaken, our limbs will lose muscle and gain sinew—
Human bodies grown hard, stolid and leanly crafted to the soil.

Salvaged chests of books and relic scraps of art,
Our children might hear stories of Modernity,

but just as a dream, a tale.
Golden are the mornings I'll wake,
cool and light, dewy and bright
with hard tasks at hand,
but without guilt,
and pure-driven easiness livening my feet,
tides of grass and wildflowers that ebbed will be in resplendence,
precious floorboards of a new and wider home.