Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Three Word Wednesday: Yellowstone Apocalypse

Today's words are dark: descent, kill, surreal

I had heard that some geologists believe that a giant volcano lives under Yellowstone National Park, and that the geological pressures have been building up for thousands of years. I had also heard that said volcano is long overdue for an eruption, and that, because it's so long overdue, the eruption would be so catastrophic that it could end all life on Earth.

I hope they're wrong, but that's what I had in mind when I wrote

Yellowstone Apocalypse

Apocalypse has come. The cityscape
I’d marvelled at for my entire life
Is now surreal, a nightmare mouth agape
With jagged teeth that bite a sky that’s rife

With death. But the descent to Hell on Earth,
Which followed not John’s Revelation (no,
The end came suddenly, for what it’s worth),
Came not from skies above, but from below.

No rumbling temblors warned of woe, no shocks;
But pressures building under Yellowstone
Burst forth; the sky fell down, a rain of rocks
That crushed the reign of man, who must atone.

Our Mother Earth lashed out with rage infernal
And killed the life that once we thought eternal.

This one starts and ends well, but I'm not thrilled with the middle. It's too oddly constructed to make the iambic pentameter work. I like the first stanza and the last couplet...maybe someday I'll keep these and create a better, probably longer, middle section to tell the story more. Perhaps limiting myself to a standard 14-line sonnet form was to strict.

But still, this was an interesting exercise for me.

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