Would you rather be a sperm whale
suddenly called into existence
several miles above the surface of an alien planet
or an equally blessed bowl of petunias?
I guess either would work, considering
they don’t have to contemplate
the sound of ice being scraped off car windows
early in the morning to realise everything
needs to be done again tomorrow.
He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery
The Good Book. Consolations. 27:29. Made by A. C. Grayling (2016)
I’ve never been fifty before, so this should be interesting,
like the day I finally decided to be happy—as if becoming a merry chap
greeting fellow carousers with a pint in his hand could assuage the guilt
I’d accumulated over the years—by taking dying classes
on a maternity ward.
What if the fate of humanity depended on a single, random act of a man,
no matter how insignificant—sort of like a Sunday parish raffle,
but with our very existence at stake?
Fairness aside, what are the chances we would survive such a trial?
Being a poet, not a statistician, I can’t really calculate the odds,
though since even on the battlefield there are occasional acts of kindness,
we might be just fine.
But if something like glueing a nail upright to a pavement slab
that I stumbled upon on my evening stroll is not an isolated incident,
then we are eternally screwed.
hidden pilcrow 