The Hollow Age

By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA)

We are the voices that murmur in glass towers,
The echoes of sermons drowned in the market’s din,
Bending the knee to the neon gods of commerce,
Where wisdom is sold by the gram.

Hollow men in tailored faith,
Kneeling not in prayer but in transaction,
Clutching rosaries of profit and loss,
Counting the beads of a vanishing soul.

I saw prophets weep in the broken streets,
Their voices cracked like old parchment,
As kings exchanged their crowns for algorithms,
And saints were buried beneath statistics.

The temples now shine with digital light,
Empty pews, but full collections,
The pulpit speaks of dividends,
And salvation is wired through screens.

In this hollow age,
The shepherds flee, the flocks disperse,
The rivers run with the ink of forgotten scriptures,
And the wind whispers names we no longer recall.

We are lost in the neon wilderness,
Searching for a voice beyond our own,
And yet, all we hear
Is the rustling of receipts.

A meditation on the spiritual and moral decline of the modern world, this poem echoes the despair of a civilization adrift.