Delphica Unclipped

Delphica Unclipped

by Elizabeth Saama

Aladon, 3071, Deconsecrated.

Looking upon the remains of the world, I ask this question: What will you do when it comes for your daughters? Sons? Friends? Allies? Enemies? How long will you let yourself to be contaminated? Re-contaminated? Re-born, just to die the same. Will that be the true paradise of relief? I was told that is a paradise lost. Nothing was learned from the old Earth and now the same mistakes occur again. True, that history repeats itself, good or bad. As the pillars fall and the new regimes rebuild themselves, I first hide within myself to find that bit of paradise.

It is natural.

I close my eyes trying to erase the engraved images in my memory. I ask this question upon myself: How can there be paradise if your world has been doomed from your ancestors’ sins?

She above us all gave the warning, falling upon deaf ears. It was viewed as a future wrapped in false riddles.

Watched as her own family died, homes decayed, life source drained. All under the guise of innovation, improvement, information, a world through rose-coloured glasses. Now she sits on her throne of thorns and bones, aware of our fortune, but her hands are now tied by fate. This is now her paradise, a paradise reborn. I shall accept it as just.

I lay in her lap, my head in her hands, those that cover the sounds of screams and wails for her help. She is turned away, eyes gouged out from the years of slashing at her vision, her desires. I will watch for her, chosen to see as the world burns, to halt the old regime, to instead create my 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 negligence of those claiming to know best of our safety.

Our safety? Or our erasure?

We will not be the victor of this round. Aladon has failed, as Earth before us. She has given me the chance to spare the few; are you worthy of creating a new paradise? One born from the ashes… one re-shaped into a fantasy of substance and meaning. Will we be scholars of the new? Will the weight of the old fall burden to our imagination? Will it be a land of colours? And how will the land of the greys affect that? Questions we will ask on the way, answers that we will be forced to find in the new paradise.

I turn my head up to her, no need her comfort now.

A Mother, she had wept for us to stop the burning, stealing, raping, killing…and we laughed at her pain, fooled by our own vices.

Now the rush to save the world that has already passed and died…withered away.

She is turned away, ears deafened from the intensity of destruction. She is now silenced; the source is fading.

And here I am, sitting next to the one who predicted it all.

Take my hand and join us in our final embraces.

The now falsified comfort has reminded us of her final dark riddle; No mercy, no mercy for the ones consumed by ignorance.

Allie Carroll - Barceloneta, 2019