The Setting Sun

Sitting at the entrance to his cave

In the depths of the Wood

He was weary

In his form of the Merlin Falcon

He had flown over the world

To confirm what his vision had told him

He gazed at the setting sun

As it sunk beneath the horizon

He shuddered and felt the cold wind.

What made this particular sunset unique

Was that there was no starry sky emerging,

No moon, only blackness and silence.

He has seen this before.

When the one brief shining moment

That was Camalot died

When the barbarians swept over Europe

And death and brutality reigned for a thousand years.

When the black plague raged its terrible toll.

And now it was happening again

Only with new and more powerful weapons

Men with vaster ambitions each claming God as his allay

Sadly, he looked into his fire pit

That place of wonder and magic

Where he had seen so many visions

But the fire had burned low

As if the coming darkness had

Sucked the very oxygen out of the air.

He was weary, so very weary

He longed to enter his cave

And with a gesture seal its' mouth

And lay down and sleep,

Sleep perhaps forever

But he knew that this was not possible

Like the Prophet Ezekiel,

He had been appointed a watchman

To look and to see and to cry out

For men until time ran its' course.

Even thought they would not listen

As they had never listened

And would go on killing and burning and destroying

Now even the very air they breathed

Oh God, how he wanted to sleep, to rest,

To not have the sight, to forget what had happened

And was yet to happen

But he was the Bard, the Merlin, the seer, the watchman

That was his gift, his burden and his curse

Wearied almost past the ability to bear it

He glanced into the fire pit.

As much out of habit as intuition

And deep down beneath the dead ashes, he saw it

The tiny glowing spark that had sustained him

And all men when the darkness and the men

Of violence and death held sway.

The tiny spark called HOPE

September 14, 2006