I
Lo! I watched a chrome-hue smog
Engulf the skies, burning as a torch;
The skies, which were His Pacific blue throne,
Became as fire and hyacinth and brimstone.
Indeed, it seemed a new epoch
Inherited the earth.
And as it were a wildfire kindled
By wind and thirsty trees -- this new,
Chrome-hue epoch blew
Across all things, consuming the tender grass censer
Arrayed with dew.
II
The watchful contrived picket signs, aiming spear pens
At stuffed suits,
Mustering
Courage blossoms on street-corners
And behind marked lines,
While lightning among gloaming cloudbursts and great hail
Lit their eyes as candles,
Whose flames were puffed in shadows.
Old oaks fell to shivers;
We took their flesh for doors.
When the lions ceased to roar
And the eagles did not soar,
The watchful hung their heads,
With clamped hands uttering:
The earth shall be avenged.
But, enraptured by the dusk
That overtook the air --
The intrepid carried forth
Their plans,
Holding firm for evermore.
They thrust in-
To the earth with blades,
Whose hilts were girt with starry sparks.
The blades burnished rims of clouds
That looked like unto golden shrouds.
III
Sand piles leapt in a furnace
Burning coke and ashes.
Alight as if by magic,
They rendered something new, tinged
With blue and full of crystalline faces --
Twinkling and chrome-hue.
Oil came up thru wells
On land and ocean floors,
Dark as sack-cloth of goat hair.
We tore our robes in despair,
Because the intrepid
Could care less about
The suffering whales, cranes
And polar bears.
Woe! And Behemoth found no grass to eat;
Rivers grew too shallow and unclean
For It to drink.
IV
Unrelenting, the intrepid raised their towers,
Chanting, Hosanna, It is come.
It is coming.
Silicon had they for bricks
And oil -- for mortar.
Behold! the dead animals
Looked as if to say. Silicon and oil
Have voices like unto trumpets
And teeth as fearsome teeth of Leviathan.
...hosanna, It is coming.
Sophia Boettcher is a 20-year-old undergraduate Engineering Physics major at Santa Clara University. In her free time, she writes science fiction and informative articles under the pseudonym "Alice Snark." Despite dyslexia, she holds roughly eight years of online freelancing experience under a number of pen names. She hopes to someday become a published author, as well as a professor of physics.
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