Revelation from the Wrong Side by Beattie

We look forward and find a vision of a double-edged sword falling from our mouth and making
such a racket
as it clatters to the floor, tiled and cold on the soles of our feet. The seven
windows on the seven walls depict a different sequence of events, but the sense
of finality remains the same, remains as loud.

In the first window, a field of seven slaughtered sheep, each with seven grievances to air and
        seven voices with which to raise them. The window, showing the seven
sheep – no, the
seven lambs of the neglectful shepherd, the seven bloodied
carcasses, wronged and reeking of salt, the seven such
answers we have asked for, over and over
on our knees at the edge
of the bed, the prayers popping from the mouth like catching kindling – these seven monstrosities
are the least of the nightmares we must swallow
over the course of the next seven days and the next seven nights.

Looking backwards, we amass
a reputation and are keen to be
left alone to reflect, beneath
the second window, showing us
a woman, wearing what is left of the sun, with a moon beneath each toe. The belly
of the woman stood on the ten moons swells
and a voice begins to catch
inside her stomach, just under the
flesh, just under the reach
of the naked eye. As it rises, her own
calls come falling, thick
as blizzards and quicker.

In the third window, nothing. Not even
any unstained glass. Just nothing.

At the fourth window, we are discovered, kneeling and weeping over the hurt suffered at the
         third, expecting some sort of torment and getting only an absence.

That dreadful day of our foulness and brutish
treatment of our adored – this is what we shriek about
at the fifth window, the euphoria
that is having a fear confirmed: we are every bit as vicious as that, as this scene in glass, stained a fresh-scab red. We have
scowled like that. We have spat those hateful words into such
gentle faces, fizzed with that kind of luminous anger. We have known a wrath like that.

Before believing in one answer over another, remember the question, like it was asked
only a moment or so ago, and was answered
by the terrible light, pooling around our feet and bouncing back off the floor, into the eyes where it scratches, like a maddened cat. The
light, the light – malicious
as a coldsore and coming from the sixth window, where a beast smirks – not a
vision of a beast, but a beast, there
on the other side
of the sixth wall, grinning, its fangs catching the moonlight
as it stares at us and our ruins.

Rocks torn from
themselves, hauled through the air and scattered into the lungs. The perished
hills, the valleys
raised to kissing
distance of the winds – the seventh
window warns us
about none of this. The seventh window has nothing
to say on the subject
of the disintegrating world. It is not cruel, but there really are no
warnings left to give now. We are past
the point of that. We have had our chance at that.
The seventh window does not forgive, exactly. We are not
calmed by its wordless honesty, but it does not
seek to torment. We will endure enough of that.