“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
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.
The bell of reckoning tolls—for thee.
Northcoast Antiquarian 