(fade in)
The empty men,
We are the masked men,
Resting together,
Cavity stuffed with straw,
Figure without shape,
Shadow without nuance,
Impotent power,
The empty men,
Movement without action.
All who have gone to true vision, to death’s higher dwelling, may recall us here,
Not as damned, destructive ghosts but simply as the empty men,
Simply as the masked men,
This is the lost land,
This is the desert land,
Here the graven images are built,
Here is the place where they will attain,
Entreaty of a lost soul’s desire beneath the glimmer of a dying sun,
Can it be so in death’s second domain?
No longer asleep,
Lonely at the moment of our greatest compassion,
Arms that would embrace raised in supplication to toppled altars,
Where have the eyes gone?
One finds no eyes here in this empire of dying suns,
In this vacant kingdom,
This scattered realm of all fallen empires in this final assembly,
We stumble together and are silent,
Collected on the shores of the river of disturbance,
The barren men.
And for one moment the eyes reappear as the eternal Son moving broken stone,
In the land of death’s shadow,
The dying wish of an empty man,
The hollow man.
