“A Gust of Melancholy”

 “I was walking along the road with two friends—the sun went down—I felt a gust of melancholy—suddenly the sky turned a bloody red… I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I felt a vast infinite scream [tear] through nature.”
                                    — Edvard Munch, 1893

The Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893 
foretold a coming techno-utopia 
electrifying the earth around with 
unchallenged human, historic hope. 
Meanwhile, on a bridge in Norway, 
the coming storm started to break 
through one lonely man’s red-sky, 
silent-howling panic attack scream.

The Fair and its gleaming White City
would come and go, disappearing
into the end-of-the-century’s fancy
of a new humanity just emerging;
back on the bridge, the tormented
artist felt such an unleashed terror
descending upon his vacant soul
he was frozen under a burning sky.

The looming century would gravely
and soon bury all fair worlds and
their titanic expectations under
an ocean of shivering death throes;
the scream would insanely endure,
becoming the archetype of the age
filled with ungodly gusts of melancholy
and a fathomless starvation of spirit.

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Note: First published in The Hong Kong Review