NUCLEAR MEMORIES

NUCLEAR  MEMORIES

The last man
acrylic paint on canvas by Robert Margetts

A child of seventy walks in death’s sands,

each grain a fallen hourglass,

looking far off and remembering distant lands

where memory still had breath.

And the echoes in his skull cry out,

while our hungry God

lets fall His tears of red—

the price of every life forgotten.

 

Footprints in the sand

become scripture of the past,

stories pressed into the earth

by a pilgrim who never meant to stay.

Waves sweep in like patient archivists,

shaping new memories,

carrying old feelings into the night.

Each footprint leads him one step into the future;

each wave steals one memory into the past—

a covenant between time and tide.

 

And he remembers a world

where men cried into the wind

and children prayed to the only God of the night—

a God who listened.

 

It was an age

when the strong paused long enough to hear the weak,

when truth was simple,

and survival was its own quiet miracle.

They lived in a time untold,

where few questions were asked

and no lies were given— and so they endured.

 

But those footprints have long washed away,

and time has become tomorrow’s past,

folding itself endlessly

like a serpent eating its tail.

Darkness drips its acid nails into the flesh of a child—

a child who has lived seventy years

 and still feels the sting of yesterday.

His cries are smothered

beneath the smog of forgotten sins.

 

The hatred of an angel—

once a guardian, now a witness—

burns eyes of blood red

as the child of seventy walks into the night,

carrying the weight of a world

that no longer remembers him,

wishing he were dead.

robert margetts

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS POEM?

This poem is about a lifetime of unhealed wounds, the erosion of memory, the loneliness of aging, and the longing for a world that once felt kinder. It’s a portrait of someone who has survived much but feels unseen, unheard, and tired.