Aornos - Funeral March for the Death of the Earth

O vast convocation, magnificent suns,
Gather and loosen your masses of gold;
Lead tenderly, sadly, to solemn accords
The majestic funereal march of your sister, asleep.
The sands have run out! The Earth, forever dead,
After a final gasp (where a sob trembled!)

Among the nocturnal silence of echoless calm,
Floats, an immense and solitary wreck.
That dream! swept away by the night, is it true?
You are only a shroud, inert and tragic mass;

And yet remember! Oh, epic saga, unique! …
No, sleep; it’s over now. Eternally, sleep.

O vast convocation, magnificent suns …

But the rebel, frail and impure, appears!
He plunders sacred Maya’s beautiful veils,
And the sob of Time springs upward toward the stars …
But sleep; it’s over now. Eternally, sleep.

O vast convocation, magnificent suns …

Oh! can you forget the medieval night
When Terror would intone the “Dies irae”

While Famine ground the old exhumèd bones
For Plague whose fury guts the charnel house!
Remember that hour when man in his ultimate fear,
Under the barren sky, still clinging to Grace,
Cried “Glory to God the Just,” and cursed his race!

And the stake! the irons! tortures! jails!
Bedlam and towers, brothels!
Alchemy! and music! and the arts!
Science! and war to fertilize the land!
And luxuries! spleen, love, and charity!

Hunger and thirst, drink, ten thousand ills!
Oh, what a drama you lived, fast-cooling ashes!
But sleep; it’s over now. Eternally, sleep.

O vast convocation, magnificent suns …

… nameless within the unremembering darkness–
It was a dream! Oh no, you never lived!
All is alone! no witness! nothing to see or to think.
Nothing but darkness, time, and the silence …

O vast convocation, magnificent suns,
Gather and loosen your masses of gold;
Lead tenderly, sadly, to solemn accords
The majestic funereal march of your sister, asleep.