Crucible
Published in
1 min readJun 5, 2020
as his lungs burned,
as the embers of his life
were callously snuffed,
our collective breath
snatched itself away at the
sheer, stark inhumanity of it all;
pushed us, finally, into the crucible
bubbling away from the first instant
that one homo sapien decided
they were better than the rest;
will we let this fire purify us,
take us farther into equality,
towards nirvana,
or will we end up as the dross,
discarded by Time and the Gods
as unfit to retain the title of human
A response to Shweta’s prompt — Flames in Chalkboard
© Indira Reddy 2020