The Last Poet at the End of the World Before Emerging from the Subterranean
I have a duty to write poetry,
the last poet said to their self,
in the small light of a pencil desk lamp
in the darkness of the bomb shelter,
and then picked up a pen
from the desk and wrote a poem,
as their words echoed emptily off the walls
and the poet's hope ebbed and flowed
like a lung breathing or a heart pumping.
and then, in the middle of the afternoon,
at two sixteen to be exact, the poet exclaimed:
for whom am I writing poetry besides myself
when I don't know if anyone else is reading it,
to which the poet answered: I used to know
think if I write for myself it would be enough,
I used to get so much satisfaction when playing
with words and now– the doldrums
are louder than someone banging an empty drum.
and so, with trepidation the poet exited
the shelter and found the world obliterated
with skyscrapers in decay and roads of rubble
and a beautiful pink sky and the hook of the moon
under which, in the absence of human noise,
one could now hear the roaches singing exalting
songs romanticizing the bomb and the end
of the poetry of the human race.