It's a bit overblown, but I made it through a sestina!
The Coming of the Red Horse
Frost thought the world would end in fire
Or, maybe, less ironically, in ice
But the beginning of the end came in plague
And now the bloody red horse of war
Kicks at its stall door, threatening famine
to finally bring about death.
And we can nearly smell and taste death
like the smoke of a none-to-distant fire,
our souls drying up in a spiritual famine.
We have crawled out over the thinnest ice,
and the approaching hoofbeats of war
creep across the land like a shadowy plague.
The buboes of the psychic plague
erupt from our flesh like impending death
and our past and future wage their war.
Who is left to put out the fire?
Our identity is packed in ice
as our once rich feast devolves to famine.
The path of lies and intellectual famine,
the screaming and the ugly plague
of hatred turn our minds to ice,
our eyes turned always to death
And somewhere, not far, is a spark of fire--
the flintlock exploding into war.
We rush toward the sounds of war,
feeding the flames that were lost in famine,
the buried embers bursting into fire.
War is mankind's first and last plague,
an unholy sacrifice to the gods of death,
blood pouring from the world like melted ice.
And at the end, it returns to ice--
once all is quiet, after the emptying war
all that's left from ugly death.
The skeletons creep out from under famine,
wracked with pain and plague
and the ruins are set to the purifying fire.
The memories curl in fire, the rage subsides in ice
The exhausted plague has lost its war
But in its shadow is famine, and in its clasping hands is death.