“No more apocalypses!” the fanatics never cry.
Extinction is bliss for those who resent human life.
How else to be happy when a caul of anger
occludes the prospect of your faith? Better
to enfranchise corruption. Defile the good land.
Pray the Rapture saves your grandchildren
before the tipping globe melts. That ancient image
you worshiped, now haloed, now scimitared,
will strain through Time’s wasp-waisted birth canal,
extruding some modish thing, spiteful, vain,
frontotemporally deranged. Tell yourself
He is the Man. Rejoice as He pries the world apart.
This is the end, you’ll surmise, the end of dalliance,
of amity, the last gasp of afflatus, of consequent sorrow.
Watch as He scythes the last wheat, which flies
like the severed heads of infidels. Then why does the bread
we break savor of no body but the embodied ghosts
of ancient grass? What infinity lives in the turning leaves
but a vaulted vision of our bonhomie? What life
basks at this homely fire but sees Saoshyant’s flame?
The embers will hold an American absence, ashes that leave
no mark of ankh or ensō on him who frees critical mass
from a nuclear drone. The last cloud will rain fire on flesh
that chars to faithless marrow. Even now the soul is fugitive.
—David Woo
This poem is one of two title poems in David Woo’s book Divine Fire and first appeared in The Asian American Literary Review.