There are any John Donne enthusiasts here,
and they're easily hurt or insulted.
Forgive me for this one.
It's called Divine Poem After Donne,
and it opens with lines from a Donne sonnet,
and closes with lines from that Donne sonnet.
I've tried to apply it to a current problem.
Divine Poem After Donne.
What if this present were the world's last night?
Sun stopped before sunrise on far side of the world,
am I alone in night, land of fugitive horizons?
What use windows and air of homogeneous stifling
death motes entering at the skin, entering at eyes,
dissolving all sight, and glutinous cornea death.
Will the drone of death plains deafness
to wandering rubble alone with the hand of a dying God,
awesome giant in the wreckage of us all one another?
Girls and boys, Russians and canaries,
repentance and loathing dripping from their eyes.
Archangels of explosion lost in the night flash.
My puppy, chin on crossed paws, watches
me write, asleep in a minute, his foot twitching in dream.
I think of God astride the Earth,
deflecting missiles with hand slaps, dying in the wreckage,
more desperate than the last man fleeing the radioactive lava
down the streets of Wichita.
So I say to thee, to wicked spirits
are horrid shapes assigned, this beauteous
form assures a hideous mind.