Tell me, General, what arithmetic approves
The symmetry of bones beneath your boots?
No Buddha stirs in this late age of iron,
No Galilee ghost walks these poisoned roots.
The prophets have retired; their tombs are quiet.
Makkah and Rome have lost their argument.
Jerusalem, a scar upon the map—
Even Kashi chokes on funeral sediment.
Where shall the fleeing heart find its asylum?
The ports are hollow, and the skies are leased
To metal birds who rain a different mercy:
The final mercy: nothing left to feast.
Alpha, Beta, Gamma—the holy trinity
That burns the rainbow to a single grey.
Oppenheimer wept his famous tear too late;
Einstein signed his letter. Now we pay.
They spoke of light—Tesla dreamed a grid,
A web of grace. But darkness learned to fly.
The wick is us. The altar is the planet.
The smoke ascends to an indifferent sky.
What survives the fission of the soul?
A child\'s lost laugh? A seed without a field?
The mushroom blooms, a flower without root,
And every treaty is a broken shield.
Enough. The rubble has its own eloquence.
Enough. The maggots hold their referendum.
Come, let us try a slower, older magic—
Not light\'s cruel speed, but love\'s long kingdom.
Let us unlearn the alphabet of ash.
Let us walk, not to Mecca or to Rome,
But to the quiet chapel of a mirror,
And find the stranger we have kept from home.
If we must wield a science, let it be
The science of a hand that learns to hold—
Not the launch code, not the glass of poison,
But the broken sparrow and the marigold.
For atom does not mean the end of meaning.
Atom means the tiny, indivisible
Heart of matter. And that heart is longing
For a world where no pyre is beautiful.
So let the generals keep their calculus.
We shall keep the laughter and the seed.
And if they press the final, fiery button—
We shall bloom, defiant, from the weed.