Doom Town
- sampled from T.S. Eliot’s "The Hollow Men"
In shadeless color of desert sky,
See the whimper of a dying star
As the mushroom climbs in the distance,
Hollow men observe from afar.
In nuclear wind’s singing,
More distant and more solemn,
Contaminated fire comes
As sunlight on a broken column.
Under a shelter in our dry cellar,
The child showered with shattered glass.
Devised to test destruction,
His purpose served. Alas!
Behaving as the wind behaves,
Our home destroyed as planned.
Leaning together in such deliberate disguises,
Death in the shell of the plastic man.
Crossing the river to death’s dream kingdom,
Payment lies in doll-black eyes
For the boatman requires tribute—
Two pennies for the dead guy.
We are pledged to the other kingdom,
The gates stand now before us.
Dreams of peace now abandoned,
And all our hope is lost.
For thine is the kingdom—
The wasteland, the dead land—
From the atom falls the Shadow,
This is the way the world ends.
