“Here I am, an old man in a dry month, / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.” —T.S. Eliot, Gerontion
“Enigmas never age, have you noticed that” —Donald Trump, in a 50th birthday greeting to Jeffrey Epstein, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2025
The Great Day of His Wrath by John Martin, 1853, oil painting on canvas.
Not with a whimper but with judgment— the hollow men are laid bare. Between the shadow and the substance falls the weight of what they’ve done.
April reaps the harvest of unburied sins, memory and justice tally their dues in the counting house of broken promises. The rats abandon ship; the reckoning arrives through cracks in gilded towers.
We are not hollow, not stuffed with lies— we are the thunder that shakes foundations, the rain that scours the ledger clean, the voice that names the unnamed.
In this valley of false prophets their empires crumble while truth endures, and when the smoke clears, we remain— the witnesses in the empty boardroom, the light that penetrates the shadow.
The desert remembers. The wasteland testifies. And those who thought themselves untouchable now face the music of their making: Here. Here is the bill.
Between the crime and the punishment falls not silence, but the sound of debts returning to their debtors— inevitable, unrelenting, just.
In the room the power brokers scheme and plot, but tonight the doors are locked and the receipts read aloud.
This is the way the world ends— not with their bang, but with our thunder— the final indictment.
Northcoast Antiquarian 