Do not allow the altar to become a pyre!
What more was the twentieth-century
than an epic concluding with an epigram,
its author anonymous among the players;
a staged extravaganza, conceived and
executed in a manner that might allow
everything from creation to apocalypse
to transpire in a single century,
ending with such an injunction to the viewer;
beyond pretensions, just a struggle to keep the
stock of old coinages in currency,
never mind Heaven’s mighty imponderables,
undemonstrative in their affections – human
faith but the dumb-show of shades and shadows,
the world's little gods too lucid for their own good.
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