The virus spreads—a silent, deadly thief—
Its cleansing hand cold, indifferent to belief.
No more the city’s pulse beneath neon sheen,
No more the comfort of the glowing screen.

The bright side of the planet slides out of sight,
Old cities flicker, dissolving into the night.
Elevators stranded between hushed floors,
Winds howl through hollow towers, clawing at locked doors.

The curtain falls on meaning, memories blur,
The world’s old stories fade—no voices stir.
What is a life, but lines we learn to say,
A fragile script, swept suddenly away?

Dust settles quietly on abandoned stages,
While relics of the living outlast their ages.
Certainties fade into silence and dread,
Echoes lingering long after voices have fled.

We gather fragments, clutch them in the dark,
Absence carves deep silence where longing once sparked.
When the world falls silent and certainty is gone,
What dares remain—a story, a song, the will to carry on?

Yet in the stillness, the heart recalls the dawn—
A music unfurling where shadows are drawn.
Notes rise from silence, from all that is gone,
A vow that beauty endures, and carries us on.

“Survival is insufficient,” so the old voices say,
We ache for meaning, not just escape from decay.
Among unfamiliar faces, hope flickers and thrives,
We tend simple miracles that keep spirit alive.

For what endures, when all the world is dust,
But love, and art, and memory, and trust?
We wander through ruins, drawn to one another,
Each unknown face echos a sister or a brother.

The past persists in shards: a faded page,
A photograph, a rumor, a bottled rage.
We mourn the vanished world of glass and steel,
Yet find in broken things the power to heal.

The soul endures when flesh has slipped away,
A chorus of longing woven through the gray.
We speak of light, but shadows still divide—
Who claims the future, and who is cast aside?

We carry burdens, heavy as the years—
Regrets and love, and unacknowledged fears.
Yet even in ruins, new wonders arise,
We craft hope from fragments beneath altered skies.

When all is stripped away, beauty calmly returns—
In the hush between heartbeats, astonishment burns.
What purpose remains, if not to dream and create
A vision so radiant it outshines fate?

So let the curtain fall, let night descend;
We are the stories we tell, my dear friend.
From the hush of twilight, new beginnings take flight—
A steadfast faith guiding us into the light.

Though time may scatter all we understand,
We hold each other’s ghosts with gentle hands.
We walk through the ashes of all that has been,
And kindle tomorrow from the embers within.