A Postcard From The Volcano

No one could prepare for the tranquil serenity that would arrive after the destruction of their beloved town. The young children didn't know any better. And the adults in the autumn of their lives could only very faintly smell the sweetness because they knew they had not yet reached the winter of their souls. All anyone would remember of the land after this day would be the calm after the storm. The mansion house on the hill was boarded up because the debris had destroyed it beyond the conventions of natural beauty. But the children will remember it this way; in their young, innocent eyes, the old, broken mansion still contains its off-kilter beauty when it's reflected in the sun and the young children will carry the stories of this town before it's imminent demise.

"A Postcard From The Volcano"

Children picking up our bones
We will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill:

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost:

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw, The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what is... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
We will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.