The quill sat in the pot.
Jet black.
Flighty words on white paper
surrounded the thing—
like strange crackles of fire,
carbonised,
now still.
I stared blankly.
What was written here
was profound,
but I didn’t have the intellect
to understand why.
They just spoke.
Though silent,
they whispered.
They spoke of death and destruction,
pain
and immeasurable suffering.
Who, then,
had the sight to see?
Who, then,
had the hands to convey
these stark black words?
Not me.
No way.
These are the things
I can only think of,
I can only hear.
I cannot articulate them.
But somehow
this someone did.
How many whispers did they hear?
How many night terrors
did they bear?
I cannot imagine.
So I flail about here,
trying to relay
the horror
of those words.
Jesus was a prophet.
He told us to repent,
to make ready
for the imminent arrival
of the kingdom.
He was wrong about that.
Of course he was.
No prophet ever gets it right,
do they?
Timelines—
like words—
blur over time.
It has always been this way.
People make their interpretations
in their temporal vacuums.
But now?
Perhaps the time
has come.
The blackness.
The bleakness.
The strange finality.
The completeness—
the utter completeness.
So I sat
and waited.
And before long,
the dismembered hand
took up the quill
once more.