or an Apocalyptic Psalm
With gratitude to Fr. James Downey OSA, for leading me through the Scriptures
“Now I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures say, as with a voice of thunder, ‘Come!'” Apocalypse 6:1
Through sulphurous smoke the locusts rose,
With scorpion tails and armoured throes.
To strike at those unmarked, unsealed,
They swarmed the earth, God’s wrath revealed.
A horse as white as driven snow,
Its rider bent a conquering bow.
With arrows dipped in venom’s art,
He rode to pierce the nations’ heart.
A horse as red as freshly spilled blood,
Its rider stirred war’s crimson flood.
He took away all peace from earth,
And gave to slaughter violent birth.
“Arbeit Macht Frei” above the gate,
Where good and evil contemplate.
In human tongue, the end draws near—
Armageddon’s thunder we hear.
In Eden’s dawn, creation’s prime,
On the razor’s edge of space and time,
When Cain rose up, his brother slain—
Armageddon’s first refrain.
In Kibeho’s hills, the southwest weeps,
Where machete harvests death still reaps.
On the boundary where darkness fell—
Armageddon’s tolling bell.
On the day the Sun withdraws its flame,
When good and evil lose their name,
When time itself shall find its end—
Armageddon’s call descend.
A horse as black as starless night,
Its rider spreads economic blight:
A day’s wage for a loaf of bread,
While oil and wine remain unfed.
A horse as pale as corpse’s skin,
Its rider: Death, with Hell within.
Behind him Hades follows close,
To claim the foolish and the lost.
The fist that shatters human pride,
Where good and evil still collide,
Where souls cry out beneath the stone—
Armageddon’s bitter moan.
Where towers fell and ashes rain,
On the edge of terror, loss, and pain,
In Manhattan’s wound, still raw, still torn—
Armageddon’s witness sworn.
Through sulphurous smoke the locusts swarm,
With scorpion power to kill and harm.
To earth they came with dreadful birth—
The plague of locusts scourge the earth!
