The Nightingale sings many things,
But the Assemblage\'s pride is a refuge from them.
It sings:
“Your prodigies are traitors;
Your white canvas is empty;
Your pilgrims were long ago abandoned, faces pale, bodies shrunken.”
And then again:
“this Universe is your oyster, but meanwhile you turn vanity into a virtue, and mirages glow in your sordid nights.
Promises are murmured softly to quench your dying souls’ hidden, dormant thirsts,
But the shadow is deepening and opaque, its presence overwhelming you.”
The bird ends its song and will never sing again.
Then, finally, the shadow is inky black and cast wide over the potters’ fields.
And they are myriad.
The rustling leaves turn poisonous.
The trials are finally reality.
The whole wide world becomes wreathed in pitch blackness.
Behind the sky’s glass, the double doors of the horizon lock themselves forever.
It is come ‘round at last.
This moment is one of regrets, for the Assemblage remembers hearing about these prophesies.
Their faces turn red with embarrassment for the first time and the last time. These terrific scenes are extraterrestrial, and They are not without fear.
The window bursts open upon the night of the famous war.
At last they admit:
“The deadly fruit, the instrument of the devil, grew in our own orchard, for we are the devils. We always have been. We sowed the wind and we reaped the whirlwind.
To use reason was always brave because it was always futile.
Everything comes to an end but the fear.
The pale blue light of destiny seems strange now, winking disdainfully and far away.
Hope is crumbling and will soon be ash.
The timbre of the voice is dark as its owner buries its face in its six hands and moans throatily; “your souls are your coffins at the last!”
An exquisite insight, they think, but come too late,
Their dark eyes amidst the gathering dark now downcast in shame, like chided children.
A sudden paleness as the lamp burns down at last.
The Assemblage acknowledges the acceding acceptance, of all things, a strange sense of calm.
Wisdom?
In the final instants, Nature becomes delightfully supernatural, fantastical things, the rigidness of it all finally turn to rubber.
Like an open drain, it all spirals into someplace else.
It was all the same thing after all, all a unified soup; the illusion was separateness, difference, heterogeneity.
Then, the universe and ages begin again, like a waltzing hummingbird.