I'm going to start by reading the title poem of my most recent
poetry collection, "The World Keeps Ending,
and the World Goes On."
I wrote it in a time when I was, sort of like now,
kind of waiting, sort of neck-deep in despair, when
I was looking forward into the future
and could not imagine anything except for the certainty
that we were barreling toward doom, that the world was ending.
And when I told this to this really cool guy
that I was just starting to date at the time--
who was really well read and had gone
to graduate school and stuff--
he quoted a line from an essay about Afrofuturism
and said something like, the apocalypse happened a long time
ago, and we have long been surviving it,
and our people have long been surviving it.
And I think it says something, maybe a little morbid, about me
that I found that very comforting.
[CHUCKLES] But I did.
So thank you, Cameron, for leading me to this poem,
which is called "The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On."
"Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats--
boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron,
boats making corpses
bloom like algae on the shore.
Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of the bombed mosque.
There was the apocalypse of the taxi driver warped
by flame.
There was the apocalypse of the leaving, and the having left--
of my mother unsticking herself from her mother's grave
as the plane
barreled down the runway.
Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of planes.
There was the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way
through sacred water, and the apocalypse of the dogs.
Before which was
the apocalypse of the dogs and the hoses.
Before which, the apocalypse
of dogs and slave catchers whose faces glowed by lantern-light.
Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees.
The apocalypse of buses.
Border fence apocalypse.
Coat hanger apocalypse.
Apocalypse in
the textbooks' selective silences.
There was the apocalypse of the settlement
and the soda machine; the apocalypse of the settlement and
the jars of scalps; there was the bedlam of the cannery;
the radioactive rain;
the chairless martyr demanding a name.
I was born from an apocalypse
and have come to tell you what I know-- which
is that the apocalypse began
when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor.
It began when a continent
was drawn into cutlets.
It began when Kublai Khan told Marco, 'Begin
at the beginning.'
By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already
ended.
It ended every day for a century or two.
It ended, and another ending
world spun in its place.
It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees,
drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere,
the apocalypse rumbled,
the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse--
it drifted
slowly from the trees all around us,
so loud we finally stopped hearing it."
[APPLAUSE]