A Postcard from the Volcano

With his autumn gone, all that remained was the inevitable frost of winter ahead. Despite the looming end, all the man could think about was the children and the spring they would return to his mansion on the hill. He knew what they would do. They'd do just as he had and has he suspected those before him had done. The children will pick up his heirlooms, his bones, and only see them for what they are rather than what they were. The children will never guess he left much more. They will merely talk of him as he had spoken of those before him, as though the spirits were still there, lingering in the walls haunting their every step. There would be nothing he could do to change the cycle of what would happen. In the spring, the mansion would return to it's dirty and tattered state as he will have said. Just like the old man, the children may not see the gold smeared in the dirt until autumn returns to the mansion on the hill.

How to live. What to do.

Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them
In many majesties of sound:
They that had left the flame-freaked sun
To seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rock
Massively rising high and bare
Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown
Like giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor rested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the sound
It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.