Five Days (Flight Into Oblivion) Poem by Christine Austin Cole

We were eagles once, soaring, careless, through
a lightning storm- possibility hooked, undeniably,
in our talons. We risked the horizon,
intimidated not by its endlessness but by what
might come before. We were a secret waiting
to be told, a moment too ripe and needing to explode
beyond its own selfish being. The sky was ours, then,
if the sky was anything at all.

Definition awaited our deciphering; disappointed,
amid the thunder, when we all but abandoned it.
Without the bother of words, the falling began
in the long dark of an otherwise indistinguishable night.
Feathers and fervency, disappeared with each sunset
until you, wind whipped, and I, exhausted, could
no longer soar so much as glide into the plausibility
of a painfully inevitable conclusion.

Time careens forward still, on course to impale itself;
an unspoken truth set to reveal its horrid reality.
There will be bits of memories, but only bits –
mere whispers of the crack and rumble of before.
Shadows will cry from the far end of the sky
to claim us, until what once was
is no more. We’ll slide, presumably, headlong
into a past only too eager to receive us –

five days numb, and blind.