A Modern Armegedon
___by Andrew Marra

The women toil in the fields,
harvesting crops for their master
whom they have never seen.
“Blessed are those who have not seen,
and have beleived”
is what they are told.
“Dieu li volt! Dieu li volt!”
is what they are told.

He is yet unborn.
He is still in the womb.
He is the Alpha and the Omega.
He will come again.
He has not yet come.

The sun rises slowly in the East, throwing light upon the field with a haughty, methodical arrogance. The cold and empty sun beats down upon the women in the fields, but they brandish tilmas of ayate fiber with mysterious images of the Virgin, worn over their heads to protect them from the overbearing sun.

_______ Painting by Paul Kwiatowski

Their backs are
doubled over in pain from the weary harvest,
as the elucidating sun
slowly rises in the East
and the women face Westward.

But out onto the field ride
four men, all mounted on horseback,
wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and
stark white lab coats.
Lo! The apocalypse has arrived!
Armageddon is here! The Four Horsemen ride!
They ravage the fields as the morning sky brightens,
and the sun rises, elucidating the morning haze.

The Four Horsemen with the
horn-rimmed spectacles and
stark white lab coats
raise their magnifying glasses
up to the sky in an empty tribute,
catching and refracting
the sun's cold, empty rays.

Through the lenses, the light refracts
upon the women's tilmas and bruns them through. The tilmas are destroyed:
the women's last protection
from the overbearing sun.

The women flee from the field
and scurry for shade in the churchyard,
under the dying Yew tree in the graverayd;
seeking refuge in its shadow,
though the shadow is receding rapidly
as the sun rises in the East.

I was inside of the Church right then,
With a woman in labor, and the Four Horsemen,
who had stormed inside to await the birth of He,
the babe, and gathered around, as if to eat it alive.

But the babe would not part from its womb,
as if it prefered to remain
warm and secure inside of its mother,
whose name was Ignorance.
The babe refused to enter the real world,
harsh and cold as it is,
and the baby so naked and helpless.
Nine months or two thousand years,
what does it matter?

The Four Horsemen,
in their stark white lab coats
and horn-rimmed spectacles, crouched and waited,
licking their teeth in impatient anticipation until one said,

“A Caesarian section, by Jove! We will cut it out!”

And so all four, scalpels in hand,
made a circle around the mother
as she lay in pain upon the pew,
and made a transverse incision:
pulling the infant from its primal womb
(though now become its tomb).
For the infant was not crying, did not even move.

Alas! It was a stillbirth, the babe already dead.

So the Four Horsemen laughed and ate the woman instead, then galloped off down the road. And the women in the fields, peering through the stained glass windows,
saw their master was dead
and angrily left the shaded churchyard
to follow the Four Horsemen.
I left the babe to follow them too,
And as I left did I hear him say
in a voice barely a whisper: "Et tu, Brute?”

Now the Church was empty,
only the wind's home and the babe's.
For the women, the Four Horsemen, and I
had journeyed under a bright and sunlit sky
as the Horsemen led us
to the edges of steep, jagged cliffs,
in what you might call a modern apocolypse,
And we plunged into the water far below;
cold and dark water that did surround
us all in meaninglessness and we did drown.