Before

her hand is overcome by the rise of sand, before the concrete and steel canyons dive down, seven miles beneath the ocean, before the storeys of mirrors have winked their last glint, buried under the piles of ice, before all cities lie dead, sinking down into the earth, their pictures of elephants indecipherable, the last of us humans wholly gone, unknowable other species roaming the land, taking to the air, ignorant of our fires, treading over our graves, that rot deep within the earth, unaware, as they bathe and hunt in the murky water that they like us will totally die – before all that, it is the details which will hurt the most:

The eyes of a statue, bullet holes now for her eyes. A church bell, a crumbling black shape - the flames having passed - a dot in the debris of a wasteland. A little child’s shoe, red, laces undone, broken in half in the rubble. The last bridge falling down, falling down. A piece of paper drifting over cracked concrete, reading “I wuv oo”. And scattered coins no hands pick up. And flimsy photobooth smiles. And, and, and.

What was the last poster you saw, pasted up upon a public wall? True, it will come to nothing. Yet we do not know, you nor I, whether this is tomorrow, or one thousand years. Nor by whose fist, or if by a human hand at all it will come - & not merely earth's fate, for now our sometimes-glowing land.