For twice a hundred years the titan slept,
A triple-crested king of stone and shale,
While through the strait the quiet waters swept
And passing sailors told no fearful tale.
Perboewatan, Danan, and Rakata stood,
Submerged in peace, presumed a dying pyre,
Masking the pressure of the molten blood
That surged beneath the continental fire.
But deep within the earth where plates collide,
The heavy ocean floor was forced to drown,
And trapped beneath a choked and hardened tide,
The furnace built to tear the island down.
In May the tremors woke the dormant beast,
A column rising six miles in the sky,
A brief reprieve before the fatal feast
When all the waters of the strait would die.
August arrived to claim the final toll,
The pressure bursting through the blocked-up stone,
A twenty-one-hour scream of ash and coal,
A thunder louder than the world had known.
The climactic blast, a terrifying roar,
Reached desert shores three thousand miles away,
While two great peaks collapsed beneath the floor,
And plunged the midday into midnight grey.
The ocean recoiled from the sudden void,
Then rushed to strike the coast with monstrous force,
A hundred feet of water that destroyed
All living things within its sweeping course.
The steamship Berouw, lifted by the wave,
Was cast a mile inland on the mud,
A stranded iron coffin and a grave
To mark the fury of the tidal flood.
Yet far beyond the ruined Sunda shore,
The titan’s breath invaded distant skies,
An empire of dust that clouded o’er
The solar path and altered human eyes.
In England, poets watched the twilight gleam
Like inflamed flesh across the purple air,
While California felt the heavy stream
Of endless rain the atmosphere would bear.
The wires hummed, the telegraph awoke,
To bind the grieving world in sudden dread,
The first global disaster born of smoke,
A shared lament for thirty thousand dead.
And though the father sank beneath the foam,
The restless cradle could not long stay still;
A child of ash has claimed the ruined home,
To nurse the embers of its sovereign will.
