In my teens I was obsessed with signs and wonders,
with working out the Number of the Beast,
decoding quatrains, counting Popes:
establishing the Terminus of every human hope.
This past October it flared up again
(no pun intended) as a response to some
auroral paranoia, nine parts schizoid
numerology to one cup of solar dynamics,
that held we’d know an ending
like a minor Nic Cage movie,
and was further fuelled by Jacobsen’s
Scenario: the whole Boreal
Hemisphere made ash inside two hours
(and fortunate indeed those first to burn,
spared carol concerts played by gramophone
and finger, spared the slow starvation of that last long winter),
victims of flawed tech and launch-on-warning
- just a cautionary tale, of course,
or so it seemed until the rumours
that strange troops were seen in Kursk.
Would the teenage eschatologist I once was get a thrill
from living, still, in times of prophecy and dream?
The woman on the police show my dad watches on TV
says I’m praying for the Holy Land. They’re bombing Galilee.
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