Perishing

"...the bourgeois individual perishes ingloriously..." - Reinhold Niebuhr

Nothing like going down in flames to warm the soul.
Or, perhaps a slow decay should draw more attention
as atom after atom zip off into the realm of the ether.
One eternity becomes another in each moment in time;
one particularity an opportunity for the next.  We study
some moments as if they were more eternal than others;
points in time where death visited with fanfare and fingers
pointed, astonished, like death had never happened before.
The last act of God in history may very well be a fizzle but 
that does not mean that nothing in the here and now
should not make some sort of sense to the ones perishing.