poetry

21 October 2019

Poems To Help You Survive the Apocalypse

The world might be ending, but doesn't it do that every night?

Is the world ending?

Who's to say? The glaciers are melting, our oceans are choked with plastic, and all the billionaires are buying post-apocalyptic bunkers and making investments in Martian real estate developments.

Regardless of how bad things get, we all know that poetry will always be there to imagine how things could get worse. Without further ado, here's a collection of some of the best classic apocalyptic poems, guaranteed to provoke a few concerned DM's from your friends when you post them on your Instagram story at 2AM.

Whether or not you first heard this poem in the opening frames of Twilight: New Moon, this poem has a strange sort of resonance. Why choose just one way the world could end?
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Everyone who's everyone has quoted this poem. Joan Didion wrote an essay collection called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Elyn Saks wrote a book called The Center Cannot Hold, and Chinua Achebe wrote a book called Things Fall Apart. I'm still waiting on a World War II film called The Blood-Dimmed Tide, a punk rock band called Mere Anarchy, a nature special called Indignant Desert Birds, and an adult film called Moving Its Slow Thighs.
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T. S. Eliot, who wrote some of the best apocalyptic poetry out there (all of which is too long to post here), wrote that "In my beginning is my end / in my end is my beginning." Here, poet Erica Jong takes one of our archetypical beginning origin stories—the tale of the primordial garden—and spins it into a story about the end of the world. Religion says that we were born into sin, so did the world ever really end, or has it just always slowly been ending? This poem implies the latter.
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This short, sweet, devastatingly elegant poem explains the domino effect of violence, which never really exists in a vacuum.
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Millennials aren't great at praying, but we are great at getting drunk and writing poems about God. Or, as Andrew Hodgins writes in his depraved, opulent and wry poem "Praying Drunk," "We lurch from metaphor to metaphor, which is — let it be so — a form of praying." This poem is about the odd, sinful, mystical allure of the apocalypse, which, if you think about it too much, often leads right back to the divine.
Praying Drunk
Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk.
Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks.
I ought to start with praise, but praise
comes hard to me. I stutter. Did I tell you
about the woman whom I taught, in bed,
this prayer? It starts with praise; the simple form
keeps things in order. I hear from her sometimes.
Do you? And after love, when I was hungry,
I said, Make me something to eat. She yelled,
Poof! You're a casserole!—and laughed so hard
she fell out of the bed. Take care of her.

Next, confession—the dreary part. At night
deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden.
They're like enormous rats on stilts except,
of course, they're beautiful. But why? What makes
them beautiful? I haven't shot one yet.
I might. When I was twelve, I'd ride my bike
out to the dump and shoot the rats. It's hard
to kill your rats, our Father. You have to use
a hollow point and hit them solidly.
A leg is not enough. The rat won't pause.
Yeep! Yeep! it screams, and scrabbles, three-legged, back
into the trash, and I would feel a little bad
to kill something that wants to live
more savagely than I do, even if
it's just a rat. My garden's vanishing.
Perhaps I'll merely plant more beans, though that
might mean more beautiful and hungry deer.
Who knows?
I'm sorry for the times I've driven
home past a black, enormous, twilight ridge.
Crested with mist, it looked like a giant wave
about to break and sweep across the valley,
and in my loneliness and fear I've thought,
O let it come and wash the whole world clean.
Forgive me. This is my favorite sin: despair—
whose love I celebrate with wine and prayer.

Our Father, thank you for all the birds and trees,
that nature stuff. I'm grateful for good health,
food, air, some laughs, and all the other things
I'm grateful that I've never had to do
without. I have confused myself. I'm glad
there's not a rattrap large enough for deer.
While at the zoo last week, I sat and wept
when I saw one elephant insert his trunk
into another's ass, pull out a lump,
and whip it back and forth impatiently
to free the goodies hidden in the lump.
I could have let it mean most anything,
but I was stunned again at just how little
we ask for in our lives. Don't look! Don't look!
Two young nuns tried to herd their giggling
schoolkids away. Line up, they called. Let's go
and watch the monkeys in the monkey house.
I laughed, and got a dirty look. Dear Lord,
we lurch from metaphor to metaphor,
which is—let it be so—a form of praying.

I'm usually asleep by now—the time
for supplication. Requests. As if I'd stayed
up late and called the radio and asked
they play a sentimental song. Embarrassed.
I want a lot of money and a woman.
And, also, I want vanishing cream. You know—
a character like Popeye rubs it on
and disappears. Although you see right through him,
he's there. He chuckles, stumbles into things,
and smoke that's clearly visible escapes
from his invisible pipe. It makes me think,
sometimes, of you. What makes me think of me
is the poor jerk who wanders out on air
and then looks down. Below his feet, he sees
eternity, and suddenly his shoes
no longer work on nothingness, and down
he goes. As I fall past, remember me.
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You can drink at the end of the world, or if you're Matthew Dickman, you can dance. This poem isn't exactly hopeful as much as it is celebratory, caught up in the eye of the storm and determined to enjoy the slow plunge.
Slow Dance
More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year's resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dinning room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it's begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home, to knock it out of the park. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It's a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about how all the stars in the sky
are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-cord slow dance. All my life
I've made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn't care. It's all kindness like children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what's to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I'm sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I've hurt you. I've loved you. I've mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a shear white dress
covered in a million beads
comes toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutang slow dance.
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This poem is a rather passive and detached look at the end of the world. It argues that we need not fear massive explosions or huge fires—the end of the world will happen slowly, and certain signs of normalcy will never go away. It's really about the fact that in spite of all the horrible things happening in the world, there are still brief moments of beauty and bliss in the midst of everything.
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This poem is about what happens after the apocalypse or after some kind of ending. Maybe it's about what happens after humans, or in a world that's beyond anything we can imagine with our small, boxy minds.
There are a lot of ways to interpret this, but Stevens seems to be promising that some kind of rebirth can rise up out of apocalypse. The fire-fangled feathers most likely belong to a phoenix, the mythological bird that catches fire and rises up from the ashes, and what could be a better metaphor?
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This poem was featured in a New York Times collection of poems in honor of the day the Mayan Calendar apparently said the world was going to end—remember the innocence of 2012? This beautiful poem is about how maybe, end-of-the-world apocalypses can actually make room for a positive kind of mutation into something better than what was.
We were mutants, we were being
put into groups

Assigned a patch of gymnasium floor —

A gelatinous plasma with star-sparking
was part of my body

Next to me a woman who grew food from her skin, we would
never go hungry

as I lit our escape
through tunneling darks

Which was the beginning of a different, more
courageous dream —

Self-lit, self-fed, we'd be
compensating masters for the world's

want —

throwing out thread
so we could grow enormous in oval webs —

Gently led to lie down —

Hard mats on the gymnasium floor and then
I woke up —

A regular member of the day parade, not
changed at all —

Despite the speeding heft of the changed life, its
morning news —

The death of ice, of food, of space, what
we call Doom —

which might be a bending —

a flow of permissions —

to forge a mutant form —

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Nayyirah Waheed's short, shard-like poems from her book Salt pack a major punch, particularly this little neutron star of a verse. Things might be changing and falling apart, but don't they do that every day, during every lifetime?
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apocalypse poems