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poetry
Apocalypse, 2004
by J.
Neil C. Garcia
Daily, across the planet, 24,000 people
die from hunger and poverty.
- CNN
Name the catastrophe of your choice
and our time, our world, has endured it-
fiery cloud, replicating germ, starvation.
And now, in wave after keen wave, water:
one morning, off the west coast of Sumatra,
the ocean's patchwork floor just snapped
and blue depths spilled pell-mell onto
land.
For a few minutes, Asia's map was redrawn
by coasts that purled mud-heavy into
homes,
rice paddies, temples, and posh bungalows,
shattering the inanimate and animate,
blotting out the line between the two.
It's nothing if not proof of our contingency:
clothed or bare, scrubbed tourist or grimed local,
we're all just crumbly and washable as
sand-
the landlocked children of a water-logged earth.
And yet, even if it's the brown shaky
ground
of all our shapes, it remains spotlessly so,
for while it tenders and retracts life
by turns,
it doesn't really mean to, for good or for ill.
It's we who intend, are capable of apocalypse.
Behold: the world, witless, fidgets now and then.
But how it trembles at the fall of our
human feet!
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