White City
Aura Thundera
deonii@yahoo.com



In a land of Gothic pagodas
She walks back and forth
A lantern glimmer in a shattered
Gothic windowframe.
A white veiled figure paces
Floorboards too charred for mortal feet
In this, a White City, a thousand miles
From the place she called home.
And like her home, her purity is gone.
She is framed in shattered glass.
The melted remnants of colored panes
Clinging yet to the frame of the window.
The crystal bulbs that dazzled
Like stars brought to earth
Stand sentinel in shattered bits.
Along the edges of her tower.
All time is hers to ponder
The decisions that brought her here.
In a melding of times she waits,
In a place awaiting its own end.
Caught out of time and ever,
A White City ruin, her white tower,
Scorched by a terrible flame
As her own purity was taken.
As she ruined the face of her own
Her own White City.
Forever branded by her fall.
Someday soon, she knows,
He will follow her here,
Just for her sake, for her soul,
And he'll hold her in his arms,
Say it was all a mistake,
And carry her away from her ruin.
As he did in her dreams throughout time.
Her grandiose, fallen White City.
The caved roofs and stained walls
The broken plaster dragons
Their jaws and basins all run dry.
Lay spread out beneath her tower
And their lights of fantasy dreams
All are dark and shattered.
At last a vision presents to her
Of him for whom she ached to see
And by whom she feels betrayed.
No remorse colored his face
No dagger in his hand.
He stands in a harlequin city.
Of lights blazing bright as the stars.
Bright as the lights of her own tower
Once upon a time of innocence.
And another woman is walking
By his side that she had thought her own.
In his arms, under the stars...
His wife...his third, the third mistake
To the girl in the White City tower.
Her White City is long past to him.
Her White City where the stars
No longer dare to shine.
Never will his caress come gentle
To her starved flesh torn by time
And her brutalized dreams at last lie cold
As the long burned ashes around her
The charcoal beneath her gives way
To the death of all her hopes
And a fluttering white thing, she falls,
To land broken on the clay,
In the ruin of her tower
In a final death of all her hopes
That she really did mean nothing at all
Nothing at all to her idol
The Dawn she forestalled forever comes
And with it the power to sweep away
The ruin of fantasy and build reality.
And her White City faces a final death
With the breaking of the dawn.