The early morning light fills the city with life.
A child, meek and innocent plays in the streets,
with a rag doll clutched tightly in her grasp.

A single cloud in the distance, hangs in the air like an eerie omen,
but yet the girl plays with her cloth companion,
and the streets remain a bustle.

A scream, followed by a second and third.
People run, toward Pompeii, away from the mountain.
Not a cloud…but ash, and rock, and...eruption.
The doll slips from the girl’s hands and falls to ground. 

The parents clutch the girl’s wrist and tell her they have to leave.
They leave everything behind and rush to the streets,
pushing through thousands of terrified faces.

The girl screams, pleads, and begs to go back,
for she left behind her beloved rag doll,
but there was no time for that now.
The cloud falls over the city, sweeping closer still.

Her mother, six months with a second child, can’t keep up.
The father stops with tears in his eyes, and holds his daughter to his chest.
He can’t leave his wife behind, even if it means they would all perish.

The air grows hotter, and their screams are cut off as sulfur fills their lungs.
The wave of scorching ash and pumice pelts down atop them.
Their lives ripped from them within seconds; they were petrified just how they stood.

The doll still lay in the abandoned home where it was forgotten.
A layer of ash now coats her glassy, marble eyes,
for she had watched the city turn to dust.

The girl too, now frozen in time, becomes an unmoving statue,
preserved for thousands of years, waiting to be found;
a lost doll in the ruins of Pompeii.