The ark of hope had sailed
almost empty, their reality
was free falling, their dreams
consumed in the furnace
of their greed, their arrogance.
Time was hanging suspended,
they were grasping at the hands
of the clock perched now in
over the growing abyss.
Once they had been gods, or
imagined themselves so, now
they were fuel for Vulcan’s flames.
Once they were prophets
of an unbounded, unbridled future,
now simply comic pariahs, clinging
to a world that had rejected them.
Some still held out hope, some
still tried, and in the faint glimmer
of their efforts a small ember
of salvation barely glowed.
They wanted to believe there was
a future, that this was one tale
in an ongoing saga, not
the posthumous mutterings
of a now doomed species dancing
on the razor’s edge of extinction.

First published in The Write Launch, October 2023
https://thewritelaunch.com/2023/10/barefoot-reconstructions-and-vulcans-flames/