The ashes of broken dreams <br />Witnesses fires of the heart <br />Fade in grey and cold <br />What once was, slips away <br />When times corruption bites <br />What is to come <br />Enagages me not <br />Indeed we must choose <br />Overcome or be overcome <br />Folly or wisdom <br />Each generation knows <br />Dignity under siege <br />Despair looming large <br />In the City of Man <br />The battle forever rages <br />Lipservice abides <br />So proud the disguise <br />Industry, Commerce, built <br />Turning to dust in our hands <br />Societies sinking foundation <br />Drifts on shifting sands <br />Sands of Self-wisdom, <br />Pride, deception, and wit <br />Judgement by status <br />By interaction in the game <br />Conforming not Transforming <br />Chains of our own making <br />Filthy prison garments <br />Uniform for the foolish <br />Weeping the observer <br />Holding the cold, grey ashes <br />Of conscience screams, Why! <br />What is a person…what? <br />In the mind of God <br />But a second in a thousand, <br />Thousand, thousand years <br />Brief, fleeting echo <br />What is our mark? <br />Why our birth, our being? <br />I cannot believe tis <br />Nought but chance <br />From nothing, nothing comes <br />‘To be or not to be’ <br />No jesters jest so cruel <br />Universal need, to be needed <br />To be heard, to speak <br />And hear an echo <br />To love and be loved <br />Through the darkest days <br />The fire extinguished <br />Sign of a new dawn, or <br />Eternal nothingness <br />No rhyme no reason <br />No need for the fires of the heart <br />Or light and heat from the sun <br />For now we see, at last we see <br />A greater glory, a greater gain <br />It is not ashes to ashes <br />Behold the Alpha and Omega <br />He makes all things New. <br />It is not Dust to dust, <br />It is beauty for ashes.<br /><br />Adrian Wait<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/beauty-for-ashes/
