Swordsman’s Path Poem by Nathan Vigil

The twilight shows
Past the battlements;
A ruin the land she is.

Kismet finds me standing here,
Like a mentor
Before the fallen skyscrapers
Of New York.

The winds of war;
The Cerberus of the Reaper
Hectors me
Upon my journey.

These once glorious cities
Now lay a rú’n;
Before my days a ronin;
I guarded them
Till Hell and Heaven
No more stood two.

Siroccos plague my home
In the west,
It is the fatwa of the Kami-Hanshi.

Rocs feed upon corpses;
There were many a soul afoot,
Now they lay upon the ground
In the thouz’n’z.

The land looks desolate,
If one looks they, than shall see
The ash from Hell’s fires,
And the halos from Heaven’s angels.

The Kami-Hanshi watches
My path,
I have come to call my journey of life:
Neisan-Erikku-dou.

The Kami-Hanshi calls me:
Neisan Erikku,
“My son, Neisan Erikku,
You are a wise, noble warrior who understands the eternal paths of wisdom and reason;
Who loves the sound of new ideas and agreement.” saith the Kami-Hanshi.

I look up into the sky
For I see the moon,
She is a rú’n, too,
But not by our hands.

The twilight shows
Past the battlements;
A ruin the land she is.

A time to kill;
A time to die;
Children must lose skill,
I will never know why.

The mountains once stood beautiful
In their green kimonos;
The mountains now stand ugly
In their demonic brown armor;
The mountains shall stand scared
From wars of peoples long gone.

I walk these black paths,
They fade as I go;
I can see the true road
As they erode.

The firmament in night shows
The stars flesh-and-blood
Like never before,
Unto Man.