Silent City - Part 3

Continued from Part 2 Beyond the suburbs, farmers’ fields (where donkeys often brayed) inhale gray gusts of barren dust where living seed once laid and in the haze a scarecrow sways, impaled upon a spade. Green trees gone dark in palace parks (where kids once paused to play), watch lifeless things on phantom swings (like statues made of clay) guard marbled tombs in graveyards groomed for grievers bent to pray. And castle clocks, unwound, defrock with speechless spinning spokes, unfurling blight of reigning Night by sweeping off her cloaks, and flaunting dun oblivion, her Baroness evokes. The sun-bleached bones of those who'd flown lie scattered down the lanes while other souls who’d hid in holes left bones with yellow stains of plaintive tears (shed insincere, for no one felt the pains). The wraiths that scream in sleepless dreams have ceased to terrify though terrors wrought by conscience fraught now stalk and lurk nearby within the shrouds of curtained clouds, frail fabrics on the sky. And fog no longer seeps beyond the edge of doom’s café, for when she trails her mourning veils, she fills the cabaret with sallow smears of misty tears in sheets of shallow gray. The City’s still, like hollowed quill with ravished feathered vane, baptized in floods of spattered blood, once flowing through a vein. The fruits of life, destroyed in strife... ’twas truly all in vain. No umbras hum with jagged tongues nor sing a silent psalm nor lade pale lips with languid quips to pierce the deathly calm – they've seen, you see, life’s brevity, beneath a neutron bomb. EPILOGUE Beyond the Silent City’s walls, the victors laugh and play while celebrating PEACE ON EARTH, the devil’s sobriquet for neutron radiation death in places far away. End