Quite unexpectedly

I was reading about Syria today, how it's teetering at the abyss of becoming a failed state - failed like Somalia, a place with no government, a chaos of pirates and warlords - but a failed state with massive caches of chemical weapons that will almost certainly fall into the hands of terrorists and could end up killing untold numbers of people. It's WMD again but for real this time. It's almost too much to comprehend. What keeps going through my head is The End of the World by Archibald MacLeish, which describes a circus performance and ends,

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.