The End Of All Things Poem by Mathew Lewis

The horizon is crestfallen.
The earth; ashen grey and barren,
Is littered with long since trodden tracks.
The silhouettes of lonely trees
Appear as sentinels.
Dry-dead wood and leafless standing guard.
The sky is washed in an orange haze,
The goodbye colour cast by a setting sun
That slowly ambles towards eternity
Past the very end of the world.
A spray of dust-cloud is kicked up in the wind.
A singular exhaled breath
Released into this otherwise breathless world.
Briefly suspended in the antiquated air
It tumbles in on itself,
Before being swallowed up by emptiness,
And stifled under the weight of nothing at all.
Moments unfold from one to another effortlessly,
Giving only subtle hints of the passage of time.
Nothing else moves.
Nothing makes a sound.
The muted line of the horizon, hastily scribbled,
Is the only promise of an end-point.
The quickly deadening-darkness wraps itself around every fold
With a deliberate inevitability
As earth-made textures rise to greet the advance
Of night-time's heavy black cloak.
A millennia old gesture is almost complete.
A crusty glow on the border of land's vanishing point,
Crowned by the first starry pin-pricks,
Makes its last goodbyes.
The moment that seemed to last for a lifetime is gone within seconds
And with it ends what might as well be an epoch in this place.
A subtle shift.
A permutation.
The velvet night comes alive.
The stars, one by one, come out of hiding.
They appear sheepish at first,
Unwilling and unsure of themselves
They give day's wake time to settle.
Patiently watching its waves disperse
In ripples that slowly spread outwards over space and time
They wait for the calm.
Then like an avalanche of diamonds
They eagerly make their long awaited move.
From the black roof of night
Hang a thousand chandeliers,
Elegantly draped, illuminating the world.
The crystal white moon rises.
A delicate lantern that floats towards the stars.
Its pale hands reach out in gloves of silk,
And with a gentle caress,
They seduce the smouldering earth.
The traces of river-lets track across the ground
Like wrinkles on a worldly aged cheek.
Out of reach of the moonlight
Their winding indentations create hairline shadows.
They are forgotten pathways,
Etched into the soil by rains so long absent
That the only memories of them now
Are those abandoned ducts.
This is a place made of nothingness.
A vacuous hole accentuated
By a world full of half-real living mimicry,
And a symphonic absence of sound.
Nothing tangible belongs here.
There is no palpability to find in the broken earth,
Nor any logic to be heard in the wind.
There is no truth waiting to be told
In the bark of gnarled trees,
Nor any answers hidden within stone.
This is where knowledge,
Weathered by time,
Turns to dust vanishing into the wind.
Where love and hate,
Once felt so fiercely,
Are absorbed in the ground and forgotten,
Abandoned by those who once bore their weight.
This is where all life must journey to.
The inevitable exodus made since the beginning of time.
A final voyage
Witnessed by dead trees and white stones,
And recorded in dry earth underfoot
As they quietly pass by.
This is the end of all things.
Where the horizon sinks down on itself.
Where skeletons of trees
Cast shadows on hard dry earth
And where the matchbook air remains kindling dry.