By Richard Mather
I
The Argument
God was striding the heavens
when a snake emerged
from a bone black gap between the wet green grasses.
Six days passed and earth was
in the belly of the snake and the cosmos reduced
to a pile of newsprint.
And God tore his clothes and
made for himself a garment of lamentations but
snake, pitiless, scoffed him beneath the apple tree.
And the universe was void of life, except, of course,
for snake and
you
and me
(obviously).
II
Earth tilts and substance crumbles.
Sparrows cry “hosanna” and throw themselves at moving buses;
a lone fox leaps to his hole and moans like a
saxophone; the buzzard twists his feathers in disbelief,
picks over pieces, turns corpses, flies away. Earth tilts and substance crumbles.
Objects strain at the seams, crack, come off hinges,
slip out of place, fly into a rage, decohere, liquefy,
dissolve into atoms
and I tumble into a hollow,
where light and God and warm and love are sucked out
and I keep small and still, like a closed fist or a shut-tight bud
hidden from the sun, and I hear the stars howling
as their bulbs flash for the final time and I am suspended
in a void, the only constant body in a vast black field of absolute
unimaginable nothingness
III
“Quid si nunc cœlum ruat?” Welcome to the swaying statue of
Our Lady of Tomorrow. If you want, you can shoot the insurgents on
Threadneedle Street or hear the crow pluck his heart out over the
Atlantic and enjoy.
Despite the poisoning of New York and the tumbling of
Beijing and the dissolution of Moscow and the sinking of
Oslo, we are still here, together and smiling, all equal.
“Quid si nunc cœlum ruat?” If you don’t believe me, Arabic newsprint is my
bread and butter. But no matter. I am simply a paranoiac eating a sandwich of
Iraqi oil or a Palestinian goat farmer broadcasting
anthrax from his kitchen.
If I was in Jerusalem I’d scratch the sign of the cross in the
air and a make a dash for the Green Line. But I am not in
Jerusalem, I am over here, waiting for the end to finally begin.
“Quid si nunc cœlum ruat?” The stars are going out in clusters of
white and the angels are unscrewing the sky from the
hinges of the earth and the devils are pulling down Stonehenge and
Hong Kong is sliding into the sea.
And then there is the sun – our sun – bursting like a
flaming aerosol and blowing its outer layers into
interstellar space, outshining the galaxy in a stupendous
climax of light.
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