Shall we call out good men as we allocate blame,
for our earth is not gently approaching the end?
Did we watch them burn forests as seas rise and drown
while they banked all the profits and burned down the world?
Did we vote for calm leaders who turned wild at night,
Should we pray now to Jesus, as we go with a bang?

As they bring in a corpse, the result of the bang,
the explosion they thought was a blunder, no blame
could attach to the army or fighters that night.
That the rubble of harm where the skulls found their end,
was the death of smocked boys who were lost to the world
and the girls with blood poised on their skirts. Conscience drowns.

Empty words from their leader are harsh and they drown
out their sense. They all need for a thing to go bang
in the street. When it does, he retreats from the world
‘hind a wall, and he says “We are strong.” Takes no blame
for destruction, for wreckage, despair to the end.
As the cities abscess into bare boundless night.

There was promise of Rapture to save in the night,
but we hunt and we capture the rats ‘fore they drown
in the sewer. At least they can deaden the end
while we dream of a feast to go out with a bang.
While the men with their shrill need to shrug off the blame
on all mothers and children who strangle the world

A black wind of dense smoke from the west of the world
with a sunlight that cloaks us in masks of dull night
bids to choke us with blood and to gall* us with blame.,
till we wish for a flood, but in soot we shall drown
Ever slowly perturbing our faces with bangs
not of hair, but disturbing our breath till we end.

In the past, we had thought that there would be an end
to all quakes, that we’d bought all the drugs in the world
to make measles and flu all go out with a bang.
But the fevers now queue in our lungs in the night
They’re resistant to treatment and so now we drown
in our fluids completely and ask “Who’s to blame?”

Shall we go at the end, etherized into night
as the smoke fills the world, while we pray, as we drown,
with a whimper or bang, asking who shall we blame?

                                   15 December 2023