In times when consciousness permeated the body
Engaging in a round dance of
enflamed coronas, turning eternal sight inwards—
Accept my gift.

Trespassing the boundary, hastily it assimilated,
interrupting a conversation between the land and the sea—
Was it all an accident?

The first swig of red wine swallowed for pleasure,
the first grain moldered in the abandoned barn.
They gathered, procreated, igniting the crania
of their progeny—giving lift to the unruly.

Against the genesis, He, too, stands,
the Colossus with arms heavier than the oldest trees.
To the chant of a million-voice choir, He rises
against those neither damned nor blessed—
Celebrants of knowledge.

They who thwarted His plans,
ad undas
Enter and exit sentience
through the prefrontal cortex,
Eternally prohibited from His heaven,
ploughing forever the crimson soil.

“I shall protect and redeem,
voracious for wealth and victories,
and nourish the ego that expands the land; depleting the sea.
And those who obey the virtue of the vicious—
bow to my will.

I shall give the power to destroy.
I shall give the power to violate.”

The vile grasp of marble at the thigh,
a fallen raindrop cracks the plaster-powdered face
And vanishes.
All shall perish.

So pity wakefulness, wedged between earth and the void,
where beauty pries the exhausted mind.
An accident or a gift—pity
this beauty. Pity
God’s prefrontal cortex.

The choir fades. The sculpture
fractures.
The scientist goes home,
neither saved nor destroyed,
The raindrop swallowed by the wave.

And another wave
returns
to the shore.

Katya Quinones (she/her) is a GS alumna, Class of 2025. She lives in Washington Heights with her daughter and writes between school drop-offs and brief silences. She can be found on Instagram @quinkatya.