She has existed across centuries and knows the truth of men and nature.

Here; she sits in an apostasy of the unreal city.
To make poetry after such an apocalypse of signs and significance is an abomination,
so she must live within the memories of time and the pain of sorrow,
between the expressions of loss and destruction.
Within the sighs of the dead,
who march in rows below the red‑tinted sky.

In her hand she holds but one card:

The Five of Wands

Its heirs holding sticks of balsam aloft toward the sky
as an offering — or perhaps as sacrifice.

Upon their faces is the sorrow
of which the crust they stand upon is composed;
birthed, created.

They seek the light above them —
but are beholden to the earth,
the mud, the brown laden ground
which is neither creator nor redeemer.
It simply builds them as its own gleaming tower,
in hopes that it meets the sky.
Betrothed to it, an arrangement by the cosmos.
The dowry — the souls of those it forms.

The Sibyl speaks once every thousand years,
in languages not yet known
or perhaps forgotten by the children of the Five of Wands.
They await their king,
who is lost in the land beyond the valley,
in the city of the unreal.

The Sibyl