Seven Windows A Tale Of The Future Poem by Daniel Brick

Seven windows face us
as we eat at our host's table.
They let in the gray light
of an early spring day,
a dry, cold, dusty light,
still tarnished with winter.

Seven windows face us,
like sentinels with bad
intentions, guardians of
someone's declining fortunes.
We eat the spare diet of our
host and drink his pale wine.

Tall candles provide sparse light,
and smear a yellowish tinge
over our dry faces...
No light reaches our eyes.
It pools in the broken
faded tiles of the floor.

The window glass might have
been a mirror but the dim
light was too shallow to find
any reflection shining within:
instead of transparency,
the light further stains the glass.

We are seated at a banquet
table, spaced far apart to prevent
conversation. Not that we
feel an urge to talk. It would
only bruise our pride
more grievously than being here.

Our host displays only
courtesy. He speaks inaudibly
to his two female servants.
They are old and wizened
like him. Only once has he
addressed me: 'Thomas, more wine? '

Our host is Augustine, once
the dictator of our city,
who ruled with stealth and
cunning. Now he is a corpse
rotting slowly in solitude.
His subalterns stole

his power six years ago.
They rule from a block
of concrete in the city center.
Augustine lost his wife
and three daughters to
the renewed SARS epidemic.

He has nothing to show
for his life on earth. No
monument, no heir apparent,
no public document recording
his service. He must be
lonelier than the ghosts

of those he killed. Someday
I swear I will stand in
the public square where
the executions happened
eleven years ago. I will
stand and wait, silent

but stretched to my full
stature, no hobbling with
a cane, no kowtowing
to their authority. Let
them drag me off to prison
for six months or a year.

Or perhaps they will
simply ignore me. Let me
stand alone amid rubble
until I begin to look
foolish, like a man
without a purpose, a bum.

I have a burning question
to ask Augustine. What if
a man who has endured
too much and has lost every-
thing his heart treasured, is
given a gun with two bullets?

What will he do? How soon
will he do it? Would he shoot
the one he blames in the
head, and then himself in the
heart? Or would he empty the
bullets and toss the gun?

I wrestle with that
question. But there is
another question that chokes
me with despair: How did so few
people wreck the world
for so many people? Because

that's what the world is -
a wreck. And we exist without
pride or hope or charity. We
are savages with big brains
reduced to living in stale sludge.
How do I live in this moment

without pride or hope? What
makes it possible for me
to think these thoughts
and not poison myself before
tomorrow? Let me test this:
the woman on my right is

named Jane, I think the man
on my left is Samuel. What if
I reached out to them? What -
All this talk in my head!
What does it matter? It's
as if I entertained myself

out of thoughts of despair
or suicide. But I talk
to no one, I hear nothing...
But my soul! I feel my
soul is listening to some-
thing... What? What?