Beauty For Ashes Poem by Adrian Wait

The ashes of broken dreams
Witnesses fires of the heart
Fade in grey and cold
What once was, slips away
When times corruption bites
What is to come
Enagages me not
Indeed we must choose
Overcome or be overcome
Folly or wisdom
Each generation knows
Dignity under siege
Despair looming large
In the City of Man
The battle forever rages
Lipservice abides
So proud the disguise
Industry, Commerce, built
Turning to dust in our hands
Societies sinking foundation
Drifts on shifting sands
Sands of Self-wisdom,
Pride, deception, and wit
Judgement by status
By interaction in the game
Conforming not Transforming
Chains of our own making
Filthy prison garments
Uniform for the foolish
Weeping the observer
Holding the cold, grey ashes
Of conscience screams, Why!
What is a person…what?
In the mind of God
But a second in a thousand,
Thousand, thousand years
Brief, fleeting echo
What is our mark?
Why our birth, our being?
I cannot believe tis
Nought but chance
From nothing, nothing comes
‘To be or not to be’
No jesters jest so cruel
Universal need, to be needed
To be heard, to speak
And hear an echo
To love and be loved
Through the darkest days
The fire extinguished
Sign of a new dawn, or
Eternal nothingness
No rhyme no reason
No need for the fires of the heart
Or light and heat from the sun
For now we see, at last we see
A greater glory, a greater gain
It is not ashes to ashes
Behold the Alpha and Omega
He makes all things New.
It is not Dust to dust,
It is beauty for ashes.