Poem d'Jour
Crossposted from here and there.
The Entire World
The entire world
is falling together at the seams,
We are imploding.
Oh, no. Oh, no; not my world.
Not my sweet world.
Maybe yes. Maybe no.
Oceans rumble. Death swills.
When I was a young girl,
we didn't think of this.
We were brave
we were strong.
We knew we would not let the bastards grind us down.
Instead, they ground down
everything else.
Figures.
Now we live on little mental islands
typing, typing, typing
Waiting and wondering
Will we live?
Will our species live?
Will mammals at least survive?
Will there be fish? (no, probably not).
Will there be insects? (possibly)
Plants? Will there be plants?
Can we at least keep plants?
Leave us that much?
Or will you leave us to the theoretical bacterial constructs, that
we think about, when we think of Mars,
or moons of Saturn, or planets of reasonably close stars.
Will that be all we get?
Will that be the "hope?"
Is that it?
I didn't want so much to go,
though I always suspected that a lot of things were going to be gone
even when I was a small child.
I used to think it mattered what I wanted, and then I started getting old and
realized that it really didn't matter very much what I wanted.
And now I think of pond scum, and think; wow. How amazing.
I walk through the mundane circumstances of my world
streets, ill-kept lawns, sporadic trash.
People in grocery stores. Groceries! So astonishing, all of that.
And I think of it all overtaken by the moons of Saturn, the storms of Venus.
Shopping carts hurled into the abyss, flaming away
What songs will be sung then? Because there must always be songs, no?
How will we sing of the end of the world? Because we must be prepared.
It really might happen, in fact it must, eventually. The Sun won't last forever; nothing does.
I just didn't think that I would have to get ready for this,
to create the fairy tales of such, in my lifetime,
as an obligation for my niece's grandchildren,
my nephew's grandchildren
anybody's grandchildren
anybody who is alive now and has children.
But now I'm starting to feel a kind of obligation, to start early
on these myths.
Because, here we go folks,
down the roller coaster
The really big one
Into the really scary one.
What do I have to offer? I ask myself constantly.
What do I have to offer?
Well, I can tell stories.
I can tell stories.
And at the end, that may be
all that is left.
Miep Rowan O'Brien
July 27, 2010