Death's Breath Poem by Justin Reamer

The grey sky above the earth
Dims the scenery of all below it,
Dimming the vivid colours
The sun once provided.
Snow lay across the land,
Covering the Earth like a giant white sheet.
The trees are bare, stripped of their leaves,
Giving shame to their nakedness
As they stand like corpses in despair.

Life is gone, all animals vanished,
For they have all migrated,
Or they lay dead and dying
As they try to search for their food.
Starvation kills them one at a time
As Death stoops down to take their souls
And lets them decompose.
Nothing is here in the silence
As the snow falls slowly,
The barren wasteland before me.
The animals are slowly dying,
Craving food every day,
But slowly becoming emaciated.

The trees stand like corpses in open coffins,
Barren of all flesh and foliage,
Empty structures standing before
The very forest they grew in.
In the village, the people are
Dying from the plague that struck them,
Slowly suffering each fateful day.

And I, I suffer slowly from
The calamities that besieged me,
Each taking hold of my heart
And tearing it apart.
Pain lingers in my mind,
In my heart, and in my soul,
Devouring me slowly as
I struggle to survive,
To hold on, and to make
It through another day.
My flesh is deteriorating,
And I am going down slowly
Into absolute despair.

In the meantime, Death is near;
I can feel him, his slow footsteps,
His calm, shallow breathing,
His soft whispers of comfort to
Those who slowly die and
Wish for some consolation
Or termination of their misery.
He approaches me, and I
Can hear the shallow breathing
And a soft whisper touches my ear:
'Now is not your time.'

He slowly walks away,
And I begin to weep.
No consolation in this world,
Nothing but dreariness and death.
I was ready to die,
Ready to pas on, to perish,
But it wasn't my time,
So I go on living in misery.

Life takes me nowhere as I continue to live,
And my misery continues to devour me;
Into the abyss, I fall,
Deeper and deeper,
Until the darkness comes over me.
In the darkness, I can never see,
But only suffer continuously
As my life leads to nothingness.