And what if the world isn’t ending?
I know about the others
who were certain they lived in the twilight:
they made ceremonies, shaved
their bodies, killed themselves
before they could be crushed
by time. Holy fools who
mistook their feelings for history.
They knew what the earth deserves
from us: our absence.
What if it just goes on this way,
ugly, terrifying, so that I forget
the texture of crumbling flyleaf
in the rotting book from my library,
so that no one is old enough to remember
what it felt like to solve a problem,
to really fix it—no more smallpox,
not anywhere, we did that, we
the destroyers did that.
In the version where I am wrong,
we keep going. We ruin everything
and salt the wounds and still
something green and bloody comes back.
We are not the hard, unforgiving seeds
but the fire that cleaves them open.
