FALL
2019
KIOSK 61
Allie Carroll Barceloneta, 2019
PARADISE LOST
Delphica Unclipped by Elizabeth Saama
Aladon, 3071, Deconsecrated.
own community.. A world without the need for greed and consumption. A world without the need to tear apart our lands for false riches. A world without the pain of losing our loves due to the
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Looking upon the remains of the world, I ask this question: What will you do when it comes for your
negligence of those claiming to know best of our safety.
daughters? Sons? Friends? Allies? Enemies? How long will you let yourself to be contaminated?
Our safety? Or our erasure?
Re-contaminated? Re-born, just to die the same. Will that be the true paradise of relief?
We will not be the victor of this round. Aladon has failed, as Earth before us. She has given me the
I was told that is a paradise lost. Nothing was learned from the old Earth and now the same
chance to spare the few; are you worthy of creating a new paradise? One born from the ashes…
mistakes occur again. True, that history repeats itself, good or bad. As the pillars fall and the new
one re-shaped into a fantasy of substance and meaning. Will we be scholars of the new? Will the
regimes rebuild themselves, I first hide within myself to find that bit of paradise.
weight of the old fall burden to our imagination? Will it be a land of colours? And how will the land
It is natural.
of the greys affect that? Questions we will ask on the way, answers that we will be forced to find in
I close my eyes trying to erase the engraved images in my memory. I ask this question upon
the new paradise.
myself: How can there be paradise if your world has been doomed from your ancestors’ sins?
I turn my head up to her, no need her comfort now.
She above us all gave the warning, falling upon deaf ears. It was viewed as a future wrapped in
A Mother, she had wept for us to stop the burning, stealing, raping, killing…and we laughed at her
false riddles.
pain, fooled by our own vices.
Watched as her own family died, homes decayed, life source drained. All under the guise of
Now the rush to save the world that has already passed and died…withered away.
innovation, improvement, information, a world through rose-coloured glasses. Now she sits on
She is turned away, ears deafened from the intensity of destruction. She is now silenced; the
her throne of thorns and bones, aware of our fortune, but her hands are now tied by fate. This is
source is fading.
now her paradise, a paradise reborn. I shall accept it as just.
And here I am, sitting next to the one who predicted it all.
I lay in her lap, my head in her hands, those that cover the sounds of screams and wails for her
Take my hand and join us in our final embraces.
help. She is turned away, eyes gouged out from the years of slashing at her vision, her desires.
The now falsified comfort has reminded us of her final dark riddle; No mercy, no mercy for the
I will watch for her, chosen to see as the world burns, to halt the old regime, to instead create my
ones consumed by ignorance.
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