Chapter 8

1. This is what the Lord God showed me next:

a basket of freshly picked apples. 

2. He said, “Amos, what do you see?” 

And I said, “A basket of freshly picked apples."

Then the Lord said to me, 

“The end of the harvest is near, 

and I’m ready to pluck the last of you 

off of my trees; 

I will never tend to them again.

They will rot where they fall.

3. Your 'positive, encouraging' radio stations 

shall be replaced with wailing and fury 

on that day,” 

says the Lord God; 

“the corpses shall fill the streets, 

spilling out of the crowded morgues and hospitals".

SILENCE!

4.      Hear this, you that trample on the needy, 

    and bring ruin to the poor, 

5. saying, "When will the holidays be over 

so that we may reopen and start making money; 

and the weekend, 

so that we may open the office again? 

We will manipulate the stock market 

with risky 'financial products',

And will gamble with the lives of millions 

to add to our own wealth,

and cover our tracks by owning politicians.  

6. We will buy the desperate poor for 7 bucks an hour

and illegal aliens for less, 

and sell back to them salty chemicals 

instead of food"

7. The LORD has sworn by his own glory: 

"Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.” 

8. Shall not the nation tremble on this account, 

and everyone mourn who lives in it, 

and all of it rise like floodwaters, 

and be smashed to pieces 

and carried back out to sea? 

9. On that day, says the Lord GOD, 

I will rip the light out of your souls, 

like a solar eclipse robs the Earth of light 

and plunges it into dark in an instant. 

10. I will turn your celebrations into funerals, 

and all your songs into weeping; 

Rich and poor alike will be dressed in filthy rags, 

And the only makeup that will be seen

is the eyeliner running down your face; 

You will mourn like a parent 

who has lost their only child, 

And you will beg for the end. 

11. The time is surely coming, 

says the Lord GOD, 

when I will send a famine on the land; 

not a shortage of food, or a shortage of water, 

but of hearing the words of the LORD. 

12. They shall wander from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 

and from border to border; 

they shall run to this preacher and that guru,

seeking the word of the LORD, 

but they shall not find it anywhere. 

13. In that day even the optimism and energy of the youth will fade. 

14. Those who swear by the neutered and inoffensive 

Postmodern god of tolerance, 

even they will fall just as their hateful, 

fundamentalist counterparts.