Baptized in Dust
Ash maps the shape of vanished saints across the cheeks of those
who stagger through the afterburn,
smoke weighs down every eyelash, faith a rumor drifting in the red-tinged churn.
The priest’s collar caked with fallout, his robes the rags of a lie,
he rasps “repent”–but meaning’s gone, and even guilt’s too tired to try.
The sky’s still burning–tongues of flame
where once there might have been a dawn,
the ground stripped bare of memory, as if forgiveness could be withdrawn.
Water left the world before the prayers were written,
now holy fonts are oil drums rusted through, forbidden.
Still they gather at the crater’s edge, hands upraised for soot-stained grace,
a child coughs out a hymn that never had a tune, dust gathering on their face.
Ash baptisms–rituals of dirt–echo through the shelter’s gloom,
the gospels traded for radiation maps and prayers for a makeshift tomb.
A mother sketches crosses in the fallout, her blessing brittle,
her lips cracked raw,
she presses faith into her daughter’s hair and prays the priest forgot the law.
Where liturgies end and the fallout starts, the holy words mean nothing now.
They dip their heads in memory’s filth, knees bruised from endless vows.
“Forgive us all,” the rabble chants, “for burning what we could not keep.”
They baptized bones in riverbeds where only ghosts and minerals sleep.
Saints were names once carved in glass, but nothing pure survives the blast–
just holy books that feed the flames, and sermons that reek of the past.
The altar split with radiation, angels melted, eyes gone blind,
still prayers echo in the silence, an instinct no one left behind.
No savior’s hand emerges through the grit, no messiah stitched from bone.
They light the candles, watch the wick disintegrate, confess their hunger alone.
The gospel cracked–its gilded pages curling in the heated gloom,
yet every ruined voice keeps kneeling, every broken tongue resumes.
Faith is what the dying cling to when the world’s too empty for regret,
and trust is just a ritual–ashes pressed to flesh, but never wet.
You beg through bone, you pray through smoke, belief unravels, reason slips,
still a billion hands reach up for god,
but touch nothing except their own eclipse.
No ark arrives, no night splits open, just ash where angels used to tread,
their wings dissolved in chemical storms, their halos hanging by a thread.
“Forgive,” the preacher mutters, voice as dry as burned-out earth,
but nothing left needs absolution–every soul already paid in birth.
All saviors sleep beneath the crust, no paradise beyond the rust,
just desperate fingers writing scripture in the dust.
And in the end, the only gospel left is cracked and gray,
a brittle hope in the atom’s wake–still kneeling in the ruins,
begging dust to pray.