The Wild Hunt (Earth As A Casket)

This will all pass away.

One hundred years i watch
Buds wither to husks
Aching for the sun
But they are held fast
Frozen in skeletal hands
And nests lay empty.

Crawling through cold days
No mirth for men
No harvest to succour
Despairing,
Souls flee before the blaze...

Death reflected in the hunter's moon
Drapes crimson light on mountains
Cloaked in pine
Crouched in shadows beneath the eaves
No more the lamb in wolfen maw
I am waiting.

They will come
Red eyed and frothing
They will come
A shadow looming behind.

Beyond the horizon gathered
In lifeless oaken glades
He winds his horn wild
The hounds, baleful, howl.

With the voice of the gale
He calls the hunt's advent
Through stormlit skies
They swiftly ride
Bellowing of doom to come.

Oh, it will come
But it shall not be mine
Doom of another kind
This will all pass away.

The wurmwinds blow as ne'er before
The earth in ragged gasps heaving
The ghostly hunt through sheets of white churning
Drawing ever nearer...

The howling cold so cosmic grows
That even shades succumb
The inexorable tide of the dreaded hunt
Slows to a crawl, straining against time
The earth exhales her final breath
And they dissipate.

The last stench of mankind is washed away in the snow
The anthropocene throne crumbles.

Let the dead earth fold me into her breast
As these wilted pedals i've held clasped to mine.

Oh let me sleep, let me fade away
And never return
I am weary of this world.

Mine has been a tale of desolations
Putrescent tides of a loathsome sea
But at last, like the sea, i recede.