"Ashes, Ashes, We All Burn Down" by Braden Kane

Everything is made
with an end to it.
Yet just look at life

and the insanity
of it simply being possible.
Of us being able to see
the universe before its inevitable heat death,
its collapse via entropy

and the coming of an ever-unchanging time.
A sea of ash and your broken vessel
with no sculptor.

You may not realize it
but entropy is exactly what forms time
and us.
Ain’t that just

neat to think about?
You may be too late
to explore the seas
or to conquer the stars,
if we ever even get there,
yet you are a miracle.

One filled with ash,
and given shape by clay.

We’re almost like a

vase!
And that’s vaaz
Not vays.

We are made of clay
for life’s cold hands to shape
and carve intricate designs
of cool ass dragons into,
or lame attempts at them anyways.

Our clay is formed and marked
by the life we live. The designs
to tell the tales that define us cut
away at that thin barrier of life and death.
All to hold the various ashes of both the world and cosmos
for a minute time.
Ashes of those who sacrificed.
Ashes of your grandmother,
who always believed in you
and had a laugh you could never ever
forget, but unfortunately, she’s gone,
vase shattered.

The remains
of a long dead star
is what makes you and I.
Without anything before,

there could never be now,
and that’s distinctly stunning to remember.

Whittle away some of your vase
to engrave that detail unto yourself.

Life takes your clay
and slaps it onto a table,
knowing that one day
even its own vessel will shatter.
And then their clay will join us
in the unmoving sea of ash.

Braden Roy Kane is an aspiring novelist and writer at Waldorf. He lives 23 minutes off campus, has a Great Dane Mastiff named Nash, and usually enjoys fiction with interesting worldbuilding and magic systems, but character development matters most to him.