Dominique Mellow

Where the Horizon Recedes

The horizon keeps retreating,

a promise dissolving into ash.

It darkens—iron-grey—

until even memory cannot trace its line.

The sea has turned to rust and wine;

its waters blush with what they carry.

Souls drift downward,

netted in silence no one cast.

There is no hour left for dreaming.

Dreams themselves refuse to form.

To begin again feels obscene,

as if birth were only another wound.

Men kneel and whisper upward,

but heaven tilts unattended.

The scales hang broken in the air,

and no hand steadies their descent.

Death has misplaced its face.

It no longer startles—

it walks uncovered, unnamed,

through streets that do not look away.

No warning.

No mask.

Only habit.

It has become ordinary.

Love, too, has forgotten its features—

no tender smile,

no sheltering arms.

It passes like a stranger

who does not recognize its own reflection.

It is like returning to a room once filled with light

and finding the windows bricked.

Like waking to discover

the sun is a story we once told children.

Sight recedes.

Thought thins.

Intelligence stands silent at the margins,

unconsulted, unnecessary.

And hatred—

hatred governs without resistance,

a sovereign crowned by apathy.

Even God seems diminished,

as though divinity itself

were a fading echo

in a universe that no longer listens.

Dominique Mellow

March 4, 2026