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THE SHADOW



Where is the light emanating from your living?

(Snuggled tightly to our ashen mother of sustenance, her concrete cloth lashed tightly around our mouths while decaying organs clang upon their rusty pipes, a reverie to the stone dragons sleeping in our dark.)

Where are the soft, milk-filled breasts of your suckling mercy? Have they too been punctured by the weight of your sins? Do they now ooze out offerings at the foot of tyranny’s trough?

(All’s been drained, shipped away in barrels.)

How do you endure, pitiful as you are?

(We are homeless upon these darkened streets. Homeless and hungry in our unremarkable dwelling, begging that we might buy back scant drops of her nectar.)

Above the granite facing of shadow there stands your emaciated lady. She stares eyeless toward the spanning ocean, might she be the world’s saving grace?

(Her light has long been gone, spent, sold.)

Was she ever beautiful?

(Our history books say that her light once spread out over the entire globe.)

She’s nothing to offer you now?

(Just her prostituted limbs rising without light above the water.)

No light? No dawn? No curve of fervent hope?

(Hope?)

Yes. Hope.

(There is none left.)

Then she is what she has always been, a statue.

(Yes, but she is a crumbling icon of a failing humanity.)

Yet those that carved her and those that believed her to be the personification of freedom were and are carved of flesh and bone, hearts and minds, right?

(Yes.)

Then it is you and yours, it is humanity that must rise above your icon’s bending shadow and become the true beacons of a collective Freedom!

(Silence… and then a light begins to glimmer in the mist.)

© 2014 Mark Richard Prime
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