The beginning of the end of the world

By Lucille Clifton

maybe the morning the roaches
walked into the kitchen
bold with their bad selves
marching up out of the drains
not like soldiers        like priests
grim and patient in the sink
and when we ran the water
trying to drown them as if they were
soldiers        they seemed to bow their
sad heads        for us not at us
and march single file away

maybe then        the morning
we rose from our beds as always
listening for the bang at the end
of the world        maybe then
when we heard only the tiny tapping
and saw them dark and prayerful
in the kitchen        maybe then
when we watched them turn from us
faithless at last
and walk in a long line away

Blackness and apocalypse

These poems are primarily meant to reflect my ongoing interest in how black writers have navigated the end of the world, the ends of worlds, cataclysms and shifts in the landscape. How over and against that utter lack of safety or security, they have dared to imagine a future. And what’s more, a global vision in which the present social hierarchies and arrangements do not carry the day. In the midst of storms, hurricanes, political upheaval and nuclear threats, these writers, and the tradition in which they work, assert an alternate, unflinchingly optimistic story of humankind. They dare us to dream of other ways that things could be, count that dreaming as praxis, and build with our most radical visions in mind. Every apocalypse is also a revelation, an opening, another chance. These poems are rooted in that long-standing, fundamental truth. They are preparation for the earth that is yet to come.

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