The End Foretold

We waited on a high hill
in a house with plate glass floor-to-ceiling windows
looking straight across at the mountain.

There were maybe twenty of us.
Three days of meditation and feasting.
And when I say meditation, I mean
laughing meditation, crying meditation,
singing and dancing and breathing meditation,
and trance-like healing sessions too.

My friend Karen (who died five years later
but we didn’t know then)
stood like an angel with arms outstretched,
holding the energy for others to heal.

My friend Kay, who shares with me
Nepal and Peru as well as this home Caldera,
talked with me over lunch. We explored
garden and forest, walking together.

On the last night, we all lit red candles
from one given by the Buddhist monks —
and that was from one originally lit
by the Dalai Lama. All that energy handed on,
rekindled over and over, that molten light.
They are candles for peace, we said.

We watched the dawn. The Y2K bug
wasn’t real, though we had slightly wondered.
The millennium arrived. We rejoiced.

                         ***

Later, of course, the new century
astonished us all with terrors
we hadn’t imagined. One by one the predictions
are coming true. Are we moving towards
the end of the world — again — or the Golden Age?

April PAD Challenge #14: Doomsday

Also submitted for Poets United's Poetry Pantry #97