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Requiem for a Year of Iron and Ash

Requiem for a Year of Iron and Ash

Farewell, 2025—
thou tempest-born annum, thou year of serrated hours.
Thou camest as storm-wrought Providence,
a gale that memorized our christened names
and carved them deep upon the cage of ribs
ere breath could find its harbor,
then christened hemorrhage metamorphosis
and fastened laurels upon the laceration.

Thou wert larcenist garbed as Destiny,
pilfering aspirations with kid-gloved subtlety,
abandoning chasms where hearts had rehearsed their rhythm.
From the ruin of our days protruded steel ossature—
rebar contorted heavenward
like orisons fractured mid-utterance,
filaments severed—yet incandescent still—
specters of illumination
that once understood the art of resonance.

Days crumbled into skirmishes of attrition.
Respiration itself transmuted into insurgency—
a jaw-locked imprecation flung toward the void,
murmured in the devil’s hour
when even the Divine feigned deafness.

Survival bore no nobility.
It was creature-work.
Feral.
Fangs bared, knuckles rendered raw—
a hushed negation
pressed to oblivion’s throat.

And yet—
curse thee—
we persist.
Cicatrix-scripture etched profound in flesh,
eyes ablaze with the perilous knowledge of endurance,
hands trembling still—
yet poised, still, for the fray.

Attend now, 2026.
Hearken well.
Existence is not a gauntlet ordained by celestial mandate,
not a sanctuary paved in shattered crystal,
not the mendacity that proclaims anguish
the toll for drawing breath.

Let hands become instruments of restoration.
Let the morrow relinquish its blade.
Let futurity arrive
without exacting sanguine tribute
to authenticate its form.

Grant us mornings that effloresce as absolution—
not the sickly phosphorescence of exhaustion’s flicker,
not the locust-drone of a soul extended past clemency—
but an aurora cascading aureate into marrow,
warming what crystallized in self-preservation,
summoning conflagration back from cinder
without consecrating the ash as sacrament.

Let life unclench its mandible.
For myself—unvarnished, tremulous, yet standing.
For thee—stranger, companion, phantasm—
waging conflicts no parade will honor.
For every body limping through aftermath,
draped in bravado gossamer-thin,
deceiving none—least of all the wearer.

Render 2026 an epoch of mending.
Of lungs filling without torment.
Of laughter erupting wild as summer thunder,
indebted to nothing, conscripted by none.
Of radiance that neither gutters nor flees,
but anchors itself deep
and abides.

Farewell, 2025.
Thou wert conflagration and tutelage both.
Thou taught us the merciless syntax of perseverance.
Now let the approaching year
reach into the wreckage,
extract us—mud-slicked, wrathful, vitally alive—
from the chasm,
and instruct us not merely
in surviving the carnage,
but in feasting upon life entire—
blood-warm,
breath-abundant,
unapologetically incandescent.

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