The World Ended Today - Gail Onion

[Lawrence Robinson]

The World Ended Today

				“We cannot live alone in a world of wounds.” A. Leopold

The world ended today.
But no one noticed,
just another day,
business as usual.

No one noticed,
the holocaust of genocide,
the ghost oceans, the withered soil,
Judas in the White House,
America hanging on the Cross.
Trophies handed out for the best lies.
Trophies for the head of a lion
tail of an elephant, feathers of a turtle dove, wings of a Monarch butterfly.
Children marinate in cages at the borders of greed and hate,
or in the shooting galleries of a church or Gaza.

The world ended again today.
Floods and fires, air gasping for breath,
wisdom shipwrecked on dead languages,
rewritten history, swindled education.
Surrendered truth. Words disappearing,
as we speak in grunts, groans, shrieks,
or stunned silences.

Where are you lovers of liberty?
“When in the course of human events”
 as hour after hour, the world ends.
The moon looks on pityingly,
 and shrinks away from the sight of
Hell on earth.
Paradise bleeds out from the rotting corpses
of peace and good will toward all.
“We hold these truths to be self evident.”
The world ends again, beneath the avalanche,
concussion after concussion of hope.
 
But it is just another day,
business as usual
Crack open another beer or uncork another bottle of wine.
Eat up and shut up. 
Guns locked and loaded.
Television’s casual distraction from the massacre
of justice. We are mesmerized before the flames
of our destruction,
swept up in the sly antics of the internet,
we cannot hear above the applause and cheers, the furtive
buying and selling of our planet, the marching troops in our cities, 
the climate ticking away,
our ravaged lives, some homeless, others snatched away,  or 
losing the home of self respect, replaced by shame and terror. 

But it is just another day,
the world has ended 
and no one noticed.

	- Gail Onion
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