In the dead of winter
Death came acalling
Muscular, its heavy step plowing
The fields of the Elysian Empire
Gathering its latest harvest
Of borderland trespassers
Witnesses and desperados
Hastily dispatched by masked thugs
Both on the streets
And in pain-specific camps
Where kids — begotten from
Yesteryear’s fruit of sorrow —
Now scream from tinted windows
Elsewhere, Death came acalling
From the sky, on an unmanned flight
Hastily dispatched to target
A train in transit trudging
Through snow-covered plains
Concealing the hitherto unknown
Most ancient cities built by Homo Sapiens
As drones deliver the right of might
And fury of despots and kleptocrats
In another civilization
Death came acalling
In its motorized guise,
Blinding fire spewing from a motorcycle
At the behest of turbaned hubris
Reaping this season’s ample assortment
Of youthful shrouds
Today’s respondents
To the roll call of the departed
Join those who have passed
On earlier wintry days:
Expired kids smiling from milk cartons
Lamented school pupils labelled crisis actors
The little girl calling from the encircled car
The never-to-be-born offspring
Of the coerced confessing on television
The still births of women starved
Into subservience for imperial convenience
All under temporary custody of one homeless
Old woman, the Goddess who froze on a porch
On a bygone December
As fire and ice tumbled
From the entrails of a weary planet
The footsteps of these journeyers,
Now two by two
Like those of dinosaurs
Shortly before impact,
Waiting to be dug
In centuries to come by paleontologists
From a future they cannot partake in
Denied by a squall of human malice
And an avalanche of fetid
Fellow travelers
Long and not so long ago.
Pina Piccolo, January 28, 2026
Cover image: Photo in Pixabay, courtesy of kristamonique