<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;">Last Days<br><br><span style="font-size: 12px;"><i>Rain and ashes seal my lips<br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Allen Ginsberg</i></span><div><br>In the season of drought and hurricane,<br>this stiff earth cracks and the spawned<br>eggs of mosquitoes burst into a plague<br>of coughs and side stitches. Every wild bird<br>predicts a plague of woes. All around us<br>the whisper is of “Last Days”, the coming<br>of the end, and the tyranny of present danger.<br><br>December 21, 2005, Marvin Williams,<br>ex-Drill Sergeant and born-again Arkansas<br>cotton-picker, remembers the morning he<br>was bumped from the airliner that flamed<br>over Lockerbie. Blessed, he says, trying<br>to calculate the debts he still owes.<br>Why was he kept; for what?<br><br>The dragonflies are dying,<br>and in the suburbs the pandemic<br>runs amok. Our bodies betray us<br>and the summer’s heat warms<br>the sea, as deep as plummet sounds.<br>In the desert it rains in deluge,<br>while the glaciers vanish from mountains.<br>The stars die a million years ago.<br><br>On a beach in Bahia,<br>a congregation in white descends<br>to the water’s edge, singing. The surf lips<br>the disembowelled carcasses of small<br>animals. A rash of flowers eddies<br>on the swollen surface like a garland of prayer.<br><br><i>Better go to the house of mourning<br>than to the house of feasting.</i><br><br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>- Kwame Dawes</div></div></body></html>