Classic Poem

She will arrive when the last building collapses
and the corporeal fires flicker into the evening,
when the wind collects bits of ash
and makes the tips of the blackened fields glow.
She will arrive intemperate and invisible,
ready to inter her breath in the broken houses of men.

She has been here since words were realized
and gods were employed to enforce them,
holding the course of temples and water,
steadying the trees as they gripped the earth
with their knotted hands,
sleeping in the white sails of man's first conquest.