An endless march down the ash-blackened valley
Nerves shot with the beat of every drum
One by one, our friends fall
Buckling under the weight of this terrible now
But soon the dust that blinded us soothed our eyes
And the rotting stench turned lightly sweet
And tired feet turned numb
And stumbling over the dead became commonplace
All our bodies, becoming one with the ash
All our souls, creased over and over
Horribly misshapen
Trailing furrows at the bottom of the valley’s depths
One day the rain came and washed the ash away
The air, the trees, the soil glistening
Unrecognizable
We marched in place, waiting, as the sparkling world spinned on
Behind the Writing
“I’ve always found it quite tragic the way society sometimes leaves behind the people that it makes use of during times of crisis, and I wanted to write something to reflect this experience. The writing process for this was kind of straightforward; I just wrote whatever came into my stream of consciousness and then structured the sequence of events from there. The overall structure approximates a sonnet (kind of) but without the rhyme or rhythm associated with it. I’m a bit too much of a novice at writing (and a bit too lazy 🙂 ) to figure out how to enforce a rigid rhyming or rhythmic pattern once I had already picked the words I wanted to use.”
Eric Teng (IG: @eric._teng)
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 