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Voices of the Dying


by Mathew Paust


The giants are not going gentle,

their Paleo legacy's doing the Welshman proud--

combustibility of kindreds,

raging on road and page.


I hear them both this chilly morning, as I stroll through town,

the rising sun friendly on my back. Ahead,

cries of ancient behemoths reach through legions

of sycamore, oak, poplar, and pine left to buffer us

from asphalt bedlam. This morning the trees seem complicit,

as if recognizing a kinship, relaying what they hear

as warnings, tilting leaves for acoustic advantage,

limbs waving urgent decibels my way.


And what reaches my ears does bespeak an inordinate passion,

almost a desperation—little guys pushing unmuffled snarls

to boundaries of hysteria, embarrassing the giants to crescendo

their rumbling growls into bellows of terrible, wrenching irony.


I hear a double poignancy in these voices celebrating extinction

past and future. Oblivion's abstracted, denial and defiance

hold the center. And why not? Not going gentle affirms instinct—

the other demands resolve, and to what end? What satisfaction?


Nay, to rage against the dying of the light in one final tantrum!

One last curse at the inevitable! Ego's ultimate rejection of

ending with a whimper! Dammit,

rev the fucking engine!




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