The God of Storms and Keeper of the Winds will come.

The Father-Spirit’s only Troubadour reserves the heavy gales behind the door of Life.

Cry out remorse for hate and sin.

Life comes for all, astride the Singing Wind.”

IV

An old woman buried three sons.

At the funeral of the first she was a cynic.

At the funeral of the second she called herself a seeker.

At the third … a weeping believer.

By evening, those who waited for the wind did so in despair. Gaunt and face to face with death, they knew the dying was not hard; the burning journey into death would be. The children whimpered for the bread and water that soon would cease.

Some blamed the Father-Spirit. Some did not.

The yellow earth like dry rot stole the hope of day and caused old men to pull their leprous rags about their ochre faces and spit into the jaundiced sky and curse Earthmaker.

A mother of twins stood waiting while the dry well rope uncoiled from around the crank. She heard the clatter of the empty bucket on the rocks below … The rope began to wrap itself around the windlass once again. When it reached the top, the bucket and the rope were dry. So were the men of Terra, for the time they feared had come.

In hopeless hope the rope was once more lowered in the well. Again the bucket came up dry. Anger swelled and a temper-ridden man strode to the well and grabbed the sexton by his coat. He raised his voice indignantly and cursed the sexton for the failure of the well.

His babbled threats were sounds that never would make words. The sexton, paralyzed, struggled hard to understand; he tried to speak to his assailant, but his earnestness was also lost in strange new sounds. Another man came from the crowd to arbitrate and though his sounds were syllables of peace he too could form no words.

Fear came upon the city. Words, like water, ceased to be. Paragraphs of gibberish proceeded, but not communication. Wails without words rose from the yellow dust.

Anxiety closed in with night. A wordless mass hysteria became the common dread that each one knew but none could speak. And when words die, the little fears become the terrors of the night. They knew that death would come and when it did all men would die without a cry of hope or sensible despair. No final statements and no eulogies—no reaching out for touch. Life would die together—all, at once, yet separately. And none could even say “Good-bye!”

Terra kills, but Terra will not die.

Heartless Terra will not even

Let her children cry.

Terra is a spinning vault,

A mass of dusty graves,

The tombyard of her dreamers,

The mausoleum of her brave.

Terra has just one stone

To mark her great insanity:

Across her continents it reads:

“HERE LIES HUMANITY!”