Thomas Paul Fondy

These verses and stories celebrate and reverence the majestic beauty of our shared humanity; our common sisterhood and brotherhood that bonds us to each other and to a thousand generations gone before. "We are joined from the dust of heaven, borne on the cosmic breeze. We raise our chorus to the cradle of life, set our music upon starry seas." "We celebrate the pulse of life, unbroken beat, shared by all, though we never meet. Echoes from the dawn of time. Singing to the yet to be." Even while celebrating the majesty of being human, we can have no illusions about the heartless ferocity of which we are sometimes capable, when we fail to love one another and to honor the human dignity that the majesty of our shared origins demands for all of us. In the Great Fire Death of 1939 to 1945 this book poses the question meant to reverberate for a thousand years: What was it like when the rampaging mindless pathogen was not the Black Death and Yersinia pestis, but the Fire Death and Homo sapiensia pestis? We remember the joys of days that once we shared with the friends of the long-gone then, who oh so briefly life anew. We shed a tear for children who never came to be because of young people who lost their lives or their loves in war: "Those never held in times embrace, time cannot forget, nor all of time together their precious like beget, the spirits of children of lovers never met." We can come to understand that we are the miracle of creation: a creature who can touch past time, can sing, can care. We can come to know: the mystery past power of words alone, what wonders are we all.