Play, sweet fiddler, play

The muffled wails of doomed humanity,
Ghostly signatures of a world aflame;

Somewhere not far away a soldier dies,
His unborn child will know a photograph;

A field of sand, an arid oasis,
Our hopes shrunk like mountainous ice, adrift;

The whale song is sad elegy spun out,
Through black void to some ET antenna;

A hand is poised above a field of white,
The whetted quill like hungry vulture's beak;

Words are my fiddle as the world burns bright;
I imagine you to ask "Why bother?"

So that I may then reply sublimely,
"For Christ's sake, I have got to do something."