WEBVTT

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There are any John
Donne enthusiasts here,

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and they're easily
hurt or insulted.

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Forgive me for this one.

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It's called Divine
Poem After Donne,

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and it opens with lines
from a Donne sonnet,

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and closes with lines
from that Donne sonnet.

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I've tried to apply it
to a current problem.

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Divine Poem After Donne.

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What if this present were
the world's last night?

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Sun stopped before sunrise
on far side of the world,

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am I alone in night, land
of fugitive horizons?

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What use windows and air
of homogeneous stifling

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death motes entering at
the skin, entering at eyes,

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dissolving all sight, and
glutinous cornea death.

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Will the drone of
death plains deafness

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to wandering rubble alone
with the hand of a dying God,

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awesome giant in the wreckage
of us all one another?

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Girls and boys,
Russians and canaries,

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repentance and loathing
dripping from their eyes.

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Archangels of explosion
lost in the night flash.

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My puppy, chin on
crossed paws, watches

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me write, asleep in a minute,
his foot twitching in dream.

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I think of God
astride the Earth,

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deflecting missiles with hand
slaps, dying in the wreckage,

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more desperate than the last
man fleeing the radioactive lava

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down the streets of Wichita.

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So I say to thee,
to wicked spirits

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are horrid shapes
assigned, this beauteous

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form assures a hideous mind.

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