The prophetic poem Apokalypsis Teleiosis contemplates the culmination of divine purpose—the moment when revelation reaches its fulfillment and silence follows.
The poem unfolds in five movements, each drawing the reader deeper into a journey from divine articulation to fulfillment. Its use of Greek and biblical language is not ornamental but intentional—forming a theological vocabulary that bridges scripture and philosophy. The capitalization of words like Word, Breath, Fire, and Light serves as a kind of “visual theology,” intensifying as the poem progresses toward unity.
This is not a vision of divine ending or abandonment, but of ineffable transformation—a passage into that which exceeds our categories of presence and absence alike. Rather than following familiar apocalyptic themes of sovereignty, judgment, or renewal, this vision moves beyond such categories entirely. The divine is not framed in terms of rule or absence but as a transformation beyond presence and absence alike. It does not end in proclamation but in ordained silence—the stillness that remains when all has been spoken.
This final movement invites contemplation rather than conclusion. The closing line, “In Light beyond light, all is whole,” is not an answer but an opening—a gesture toward the mystery that lies beyond both prophecy and language itself.
The author notes, accessible after the poem by clicking on the button, provides more information about the structure and specifics of the poem.
Apokalypsis Teleiosis (A Vision of Fulfillment)
Γέγοναν. ἐγώ εἰμι τὸ Ἄλφα καὶ τὸ Ὦ, ἡ ἀρχὴ καὶ τὸ τέλος. (It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.) — Revelation 21:6
I. Logos Tetelestai (The Word Fulfilled)
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, And all arose from His breath— Light from void, form from welter deep. The Breath that shaped Adam from dust Now settles silent in the wind. Not lost, nor cast aside in ruin, But drawn unto the end ordained. No faltering step, no shadowed doubt— All Will is met, all Purpose whole.
II. Epistrophe (The Return)
The Fire that set the stars in course Fades not, but meets its destined Rest. The Name that called the dawn to rise— El Shaddai, Elohim, I AM— Now slips beyond the grasp of time. Not in despair, nor weary sigh, Not in surrender, nor retreat, But in the fullness of the Path, As ocean answers to the shore.
III. Gnosis (Divine Knowledge)
I AM Alpha and Omega, the Spark, the Ember’s end, The Shadow stretched across the arc. I AM the Hand that formed the hand, The Dust that walks, the Flame that thinks. From Me to Me, from seed to bloom, From silence into vaster still. Not lost, not less, but all complete— The Die returns unto the Forge.
IV. Eschaton Kairos (The Fulfillment of Time)
Now breathless waits the sacred Sky, Now sound itself resigns to hush. No temple stands, no altar burns, For worship folds into the Vast. The Voice that thundered from the mountain, That split the sea and called the dead, Lies hushed within the closing Dawn. No fear, no cry, no wrath, no woe— Only the quiet after all.
V. Epekeina (Beyond)
Here fulfills the prophet’s final sight, For where He goes, none else may gaze. Not death, nor night, nor vanquished might, But passing into more than Being. A hush beyond the thought of man, A stillness more than endless void. The First has met the final Dawn— The circle breaks, the mirror fades, Purpose achieved in Perfect Light.
Abandoned classroom. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
The destruction of the U.S. Department of Education is not merely a bureaucratic restructuring or an attempt at governmental efficiency. It is, rather, a brutal, ideologically driven attack on public and higher education itself—an assault decades in the making. The immediate consequences, such as the callous firing of over 1,300 employees and the gutting of its Office for Civil Rights, are alarming, but they are only symptoms of a broader effort to delegitimize and dismantle the tradition of public education in America. This is no accident; it is a deliberate and malicious campaign waged by reactionary forces who have long sought to annihilate the very concept of education as a public good.
Before addressing the broader catastrophe, it is essential to recognize the dedicated public servants whose careers have been abruptly and callously ended. These were not faceless bureaucrats but individuals who dedicated their lives to ensuring access to quality education, protecting civil rights, and supporting students, parents, and teachers. They are the ones who worked tirelessly to administer federal student aid, enforce anti-discrimination laws, and uphold policies meant to ensure that education remained a pathway to opportunity rather than a privilege of the few. To see them falsely maligned and slandered while being discarded so cruelly is an injustice, not only to them but to the nation they so nobly served.
To understand the scope of this travesty, one must acknowledge that public education in the United States has been under sustained assault—not from bureaucrats, not from educators, and certainly not from the imagined “woke” enemies that conservative demagogues irrationally scream about—but from the anti-public education, anti-higher education agenda of the right-wing forces that have festered in the American political landscape since Brown v. Board of Education so deeply outraged the bigoted sensibilities of many Americans. This movement, which cloaks itself in deceptive terms like “school choice” and “parental rights,” is nothing more than a long-running campaign to dismantle public education in favor of a reactionary, privatized system that siphons resources from the many to enrich the few.
Milton Friedman, the sinister patron saint of the libertarian free-market fantasy, provided the economic blueprint for this war on public education. His advocacy for school vouchers was never about “improving education” or “empowering parents”—it was about facilitating the exodus of white children from integrated schools while redirecting public funds into private, often exclusionary institutions. The modern conservative attack on public education is a direct continuation of this shameful tradition, now infused with fresh venom as it seeks to erase any federal coordination, civil rights protections, and guarantee of equal access to education.
And now, with breathtaking ruthlessness, this agenda is reaching its culmination at the hands of pusillanimous politicians hiding behind false narratives. The elimination of nearly half the workforce of the Department of Education within the first two months of the second reign of incompetence is an unmistakable step toward the total obliteration of the department. The Office for Civil Rights, already struggling to process the nearly 25,000 complaints of discrimination it receives from the public yearly and one of the last remaining institutional bulwarks against discrimination in schools—has been slashed to the bone, ensuring that students with disabilities and others who are discriminated against, whether on sex or race or national origin, will have nowhere to turn for timely relief when their rights are trampled. This is not accidental; this is the plan.
The current Education Secretary, in the grand Orwellian tradition of this administration, has assured the public that these cuts will somehow improve “efficiency” and “accountability.” Such statements are not merely disingenuous—they are outright lies, designed to mask the true intent behind this evisceration: to dismantle any federal structure that protects education as a right rather than a privilege reserved for the wealthy and well-connected.
Adding further insult to this grievous injury, the most aggrieved one has handed the reins of this demolition project to none other than our billionaire tech overlord. This grotesque display of plutocratic interference sees our billionaire tech overlord—who has no experience in education policy but plenty of experience in exploiting workers—granted unfettered access to sensitive government data and decision-making power over federal agencies. Under the laughable guise of “efficiency,” his Technokratische Jugend has set about dismantling the very institutions that serve as the backbone of public education, further centralizing power in the hands of the ultra-rich while leaving working Americans to suffer the consequences.
But let us be clear: this is not just an attack on those in public service. It is an attack on the very principle that education should be accessible to all, that an informed citizenry is essential to democracy, that knowledge should not be hoarded by the privileged few. It is an attack on the American future, a calculated and malevolent act of national sabotage designed to entrench ignorance and subjugation. Presently, the enlightened pro-choice anti-education agenda of our political elite has delivered unto us a nation where 54 percent of adults read only at the 6th grade level—imagine a decade hence where we will be!
Public education is not a luxury; it is the foundation of an equitable society. The destruction of the U.S. Department of Education is not about “efficiency” or “streamlining” government—it is about ensuring that the levers of power remain in the hands of a select few while the masses are kept ignorant, powerless, and too overwhelmed to fight back. This is a crisis of democracy, and it will have consequences that reverberate for generations.
The wreckage of this assault will be vast and far-reaching. Higher education costs will continue to increase as many institutions shutter their doors, vocational training programs will wither, and civil rights enforcement in schools will become an afterthought, if it exists at all. Meanwhile, a handful of oligarchs and right-wing ideologues will gloat over their victory, having successfully reduced one of the last bastions promoting American progress into a smoldering ruin. And continue to pay attention to the war on institutions of higher education, our overlords are not done reducing our heirs into ignorance.
Detail highlighting the dust motes from “Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne” (Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams, 1900) By Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) Oil on canvas, 70 cm × 59 cm Ordrupgaard Museum. Photograph Public Domain.
Dust lingers in the ruins of empires, in the fading footprints of the past. It clings to the forgotten, settles upon the broken. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land declares “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” evoking a profound existential dread—the terror of insignificance, the finality of death in a world where nothing endures. Shelley’s Ozymandias presents the cruel irony that even the mightiest fall into dust, their ambitions erased by time. Shakespeare reinforces this democratic nature of mortality in Cymbeline, reminding us that: “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust” (Act IV, Scene 2). The biblical refrain, “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19) serves as a humbling reminder of human mortality—our bodies fated to mingle with soil and ruin.
This narrative of dust as dissolution has dominated our cultural consciousness for millennia. Yet beneath this interpretation lies a profound irony: the very science that revealed our cosmic insignificance also offers us a path to transcendence.
As we began to understand the origins of matter itself, a counternarrative emerged. The spectrographic analysis of stars, the discovery of nucleosynthesis, and the mapping of elemental creation within stellar lifecycles revealed an unexpected truth: the dust of our being is not merely the residue of life lost but the particulate remnants of stars long dead.
This scientific revelation transforms our relationship with dust. No longer just the symbol of our inevitable decay, it becomes evidence of our cosmic lineage. In this expanded understanding, we are made of elements forged in stellar cores—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron—the ashes of ancient supernovae. As Carl Sagan elaborated: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars.” (Cosmos, 1980)
The death of those stars gave birth to us. Thus, when our bodies return to dust, they are not returning to nothingness, but to the infinite. This is a poetic inversion of the traditional dread associated with dust. Instead of entropy as a reduction to meaninglessness, it becomes a return to something larger than the self.
Where Eliot shows us fear in dust, Carl Sagan tells us: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.” Lawrence M. Krauss echoes this sentiment: “Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded…. You are all stardust… the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron …. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars.” (A Universe from Nothing, 2009)
The Paradox of Cosmic Fear
If one understands oneself as a finite being, bound to decay, dust is terrifying—it signifies loss. But if one understands oneself as an ephemeral expression of the universe, momentarily coalesced and destined to dissolve back into the great celestial flow, then there is no reason for fear. The end is not the end, but a return to origins.
So why does existential dread persist? Perhaps it is the ego’s reluctance to let go of selfhood. Perhaps it is the mind’s inability to accept that individual consciousness does not endure. Perhaps it is because dust, unlike stars, is silent. A ruined city, a forgotten name, a scattering of bones—all speak of oblivion, not grandeur.
As William Blake advised in The Proverbs of Hell, we “Drive [our] cart and [our] plow over the bones of the dead,” suggesting our instinctive fear of becoming that which is trampled and forgotten. Jorge Luis Borges captures this anxiety when he writes that “time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river”—we are both the eroder and the eroded, the dust-maker and the dust.
Yet, as a poem once attributed to Emily Dickinson but now considered of uncertain authorship reminds us: “Ashes denote that fire was; / Revere the grayest pile / For the departed creature’s sake / That hovered there awhile.” Dust does not truly vanish. It transforms.
Yet if the erasure of self is what we fear, we must ask: is selfhood truly lost, or merely transformed? If dust dissolves, does it vanish—or does it scatter into something greater?
From Dust to Light: The Redemption of Stardust
Yet if we understand dust not as an annihilation of self but as the very fabric of renewal, the fear dissolves. The metaphor itself must be rewritten: From dust we are made, from stardust we are formed. To dust we return, to the stars we return.
Walt Whitman intuited this cycle when he wrote: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.” (Song of Myself, LII) His biological understanding of transformation prefigures our cosmic one—matter recycled through systems larger than ourselves.
If the metaphor itself shifts, then the meaning shifts with it. We do not fall into dust; we rise into radiance. We do not vanish into the void; we dissolve into the cosmos, as much a part of the next great supernova as we once were of the last. Even in knowing that we return to the stars, a quiet unease remains: what of the self? If I dissolve into light, is there still an “I”?
This cosmic transformation demands a new poetic language—one that recasts the traditional imagery of dust not as a symbol of loss but as a promise of renewal. If we are to truly grasp this shift in understanding, we must reimagine the very metaphors through which we comprehend our mortality. In the spirit of this reframing, I offer these verses that trace our journey from stardust to dust and back again:
From dust we are made— Not of earth, but embered light, Forged in stellar furnace bright, A whisper of stars in the cosmic shade.
To dust we return— Not to silence, not to loss, But scattered bright across the gloss Of galaxies that twist and burn.
Fear not the handful of dust— It is not death, nor mere decay, But embers cast upon the way, To rise once more in cosmic trust.
Thus, the fear in Eliot’s handful of dust dissolves when we see it not as an end, but as a beginning of something else. In the vast cosmic cycle, there is no finality—only motion, only transformation. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam gestures toward this understanding when it speaks of being “Star-scatter’d on the Grass”—our elements returning to the cosmos from which they came. If all that we are, all that we love, all that we create ultimately returns to the stars, is that not immortality?
The Choice of Understanding
We return to the beginning, as dust does. The words of Genesis remind us: “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
Yet now, having traced the journey of dust from earth to stars, we hear these words anew. Through the narrow human lens, we interpret them as a grim certainty—dust as ruin, silence, and the erasure of memory. We see only decay, the dissolution of self, the inevitable fading of all things into oblivion.
But through the enlightened cosmic lens, we recognize a deeper truth. Dust is not an end, but a transformation. It is not absence, but renewal. It is potential, energy, and the foundation of new worlds.
As Jorge Luis Borges reflects in We Are the Time:
“We are the time. We are the famous metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure. We are the water, not the hard diamond, the one that is lost, not the one that stands still. We are the river and we are that Greek who looks himself in the river.”
Borges, invoking Heraclitus’ ever-flowing river, offers a vision of existence as movement, dissolution, and renewal. We are not fixed, immutable beings; we are the water, ever-changing, ever-returning to the whole. If we are dust, then we are not the dust that settles, but the dust that travels—the dust that, like the stars, finds itself scattered only to be reshaped into something new.
To understand this is to grasp something beyond the immediate and the visible. It is to move past fear into recognition: that what was once bound into form returns to the vastness, not in loss, but in continuation. That what dissolves is not diminished but remade, part of a cycle stretching beyond human time. What Yeats called “a terrible beauty” is born in this transformation—terrible in its finality, beautiful in its cosmic potential.
Perhaps it is our task, then, to choose how we understand our own dust—not as the extinguishing of life, but as its return to the great fire from which it came. In this cosmic understanding, we are not merely dust returning to dust, but light returning to light—briefly kindled, then scattered again, not into oblivion, but into reunion with the luminous whole from which we emerged.
The completion of my poem Whispers of the Waning Light left an impression lingering in my thoughts, a quiet meditation on the nature of longing, time, and the elusive quality of memory. In reflecting on that poem, I found myself drawn to the word wistful—a word that seems to stretch between the weight of longing and the lightness of a dream. The following brief essay is an exploration of that thought.
Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne (Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams, 1900) By Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) Oil on canvas, 70 cm x 59 cm. Ordrupgaard Musuem. Photograph Public Domain.
An audio recitation of the essay by the author.
The Weight of Longing and the Lightness of Dreams
Wistful is a wonderful word in our lexicon. It has slender shoulders but a muscular frame, and with each passing year, it grows, paradoxically enough, in vigor—able to inspire more ably imagination, poetry, memory, and vivid recall. The language with which we write, think, and contemplate is most remarkable indeed.
There is a paradox at the heart of wistfulness. It is a longing imbued with both the weight of the past and the lightness of the dream. Unlike simple nostalgia, which binds one to memory with a chain of sentiment, wistfulness carries a certain buoyancy, a gentle drift between what was and what might have been. It is not an emotion of mere loss, but rather one of continued yearning—an ache that does not wound but instead stirs, provokes, and enlivens.
Across centuries, wistful has carried shades of longing, attention, and awareness—never merely a passive sigh but a reaching toward what shimmers just beyond our grasp.
It is the mind’s way of grappling with the ethereal, of shaping dreams from recollections, of crafting possibilities from the echoes of what has already passed.
This duality—the weight of longing and the lightness of dream—has long been explored in poetry and literature. Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale shimmers with this very tension, the desire to dissolve into beauty while being tethered to the mortal world. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time captures it in the way a madeleine dipped in tea can summon an entire universe of memory. Even T.S. Eliot, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, wrestles with the wistfulness of unlived potential, of questions left unanswered and paths left untaken.
Yet wistfulness is not purely literary; it is deeply personal, shaping our thoughts in quiet moments of reflection. It is the fleeting recognition of something beautiful that has passed, or the sudden awareness of an almost-forgotten dream. It is the feeling of standing at the edge of a vast, metaphorical ocean, where the horizon shimmers with the unknown, both beckoning and receding at the same time.
Perhaps this is why wistfulness endures, growing not weaker but stronger with time. It is an emotion that deepens as we collect more moments of beauty and loss, as we come to understand that our longings are not burdens but invitations—to reflect, to remember, and to dream anew.
Moonlight, Strandgade 30 (1900-1906) – Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) Oil on canvas, 41 x 51.1 cm; On view at The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 813. Hammershøi’s Moonlight, Strandgade 30 captures the stillness of night in his Copenhagen apartment, where light and shadow become the true subjects of the scene. Photograph courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain
A poem by D.S. Yarab, reflecting on the fleeting nature of time, the way memories persist even as moments dissolve, and how the quiet glow of moonlight can stir both longing and serenity.
Whispers of the Waning Light
The misted pane distorts the night, A wavering world in silvered hue, The lamplight bends—a trembling sight, Yet past and present shimmer true.
The clock-hands drift in softened glide, Their silent whispers feign retreat, Yet memories, steadfast at my side, Hold time within their quiet seat.
A voice long stilled, yet clear it sings, A scent unbidden lingers near, As if the years had feathered wings, And bore me back to what was dear.
Yet all dissolves in drifting haze, Elusive as the frost-bound air, What tempts the mind, what thought betrays, What hand still grasps what is not there?
So let the veils of time unwind, No rush to capture or define— For in the fleeting, we may find That all was ours, yet none was mine.
Northcoast Antiquarian 