What I Will Hold on the Last Day of the World - Rose Black

[Larry Robinson]

What I Will Hold on the Last Day of the World

A tin of morphine like miners carry, to avoid
	prolonged pain.
An empty house.
The warmth of shared adversity.
A coin for the boatman.

The fixed star.
The tears of the neighbor in trouble.
A prisoner who became a poet—
I was his teacher. I was his teacher.
And the joke of it: me, a poet who struggles with poems.

Didn’t Ellsberg say we were on the Titanic?
Didn’t he say all of us? 
Preferring to go full speed ahead,
	no lifeboats.

As I meet my end I will hold 
My two dogs from the mountains, 
One gray and one gold. My husband’s gift—

A worrystone of carnelian, mottled and cracked.
Earth-red. Stone of life, protection for the journey.
On the last day of the world.


	- Rose Black