Of Purpose?

A sea of white windshorn glass separates
we who haven't the strength of faith for pilgrimage.
And we watch the other side in longing
and reach our tendrils toward them.
But they are already gone,
already mummified by the stark politics
of our situation.
But we miss them - Oh! how we miss them! -
when the bosomed night leaches through the doorway
and wails the truth to us,
beseeches we remember that we, too,
are destined to swim rivers of
jagged crystalline judgment,
in our day.
Were that our day predated theirs,
and came stealing among us,
and stole us into the cutting mist instead,
they would have reached out for us in vain,
in sweet succession to our farewell.
We should hear their cries for us and know that,
if only in the starving echo of their hearts,
we were loved and are lost.
But they have been pulled scandalously,
wretchedly forth and into their ambling trek.
When we, we few
who have been left - to tend our tables
with bread sown through the rotted eaves
of their desert homes - lonely here,
go past our rushing breakwater,
how shall we know,
when we stare with cut eyes
at our sagging and barren continents
of once-life,
that we were of purpose?