Creation
By Walter Weinschenk
There is a place where God resides,
A holy temple built of marble, mined
By angels from the depths of heaven,
Pale like alabaster, steaked blood red:
The marrow of eternity.
She sleeps upon a bed of stone;
She doesn’t wake, cannot be woken
But as She sleeps, She dreams of
Everything there ever was
And all there is to come.
A vision forms within Her dream:
The end of everything,
The universe destroyed,
An imminent apocalypse
And, as She sleeps, She sees
Eternal ties unravel, the force
That holds the world in place
Surrenders; universal laws
Are broken, the tether snaps
And, in a dream, She sees
The cosmos fall apart:
Moons and meteors collide,
Planets crumble in the tumult,
Galaxies collapse, and suns
Are set adrift and drown
In unremitting nothingness
As darkness, once again, prevails
And the world is as it was
Before it was created.
Within Her dream,
She wanders through
The corridors of space,
Strewn with fragments
Of a broken world
Where once the planets
Circled stars like Maypole dancers,
Auroras dyed the night
With subtle strains of violet,
Magenta supernovae
Showered space in brilliant torrents
And herds of roving galaxies
Trampled through the universe.
God stumbled in the dark
But, resolute, She staggered
Through the rubble,
Picked up the pieces
And carried back Her burden:
Meteors and burning bone,
Molten metal, air and water,
Deserts and seas, bits of rock,
Particles too small to see,
Mounds of ash and dust,
Mountain tops and shards of light;
She bore that weight upon Her back
And in the darkness, found Her throne
And sat, and spilled the pieces
In Her lap, and slowly
Fit them back together.
In a dream, She felt, once more,
A trembling ecstasy; She lifted
Up the universe, held it
High above Her head
And gazed upon a newborn world,
Built from the wreckage
Of one that broke apart;
Living stars, like children,
Bathed Her eyes with light;
The world was luminescent,
Brighter than the world that,
Somehow, She had lost.
Walter Weinschenk is an attorney, writer and musician. Until a few years ago, he wrote short stories exclusively but now divides his time equally between poetry and prose. Walter’s writing has appeared in the Carolina Quarterly, Sunspot Literary Journal,The Esthetic Apostle and The Gateway Review. Walter lives in a suburb just outside Washington, D. C.
