ESCHATOLOGY
I accompany this life’s events like a personal journalist:
“Little did she know when she got in the car that afternoon ...”;
or “Despite inauspicious beginnings,
this was to be their happiest year.”
Little did I expect that our horoscopes would prove true.
And how could we foresee an answer to
that frankly secular prayer, we with so little faith
as to be false prophets to our most fortunate gifts.
I am glad when doom fails. Inept apocalypse
is a specialty of the times: the suffering of the rich
at the hand of riches; the second and third comings of wars.
Shouldn’t we refuse prediction
that the untried today is guilty, that immeasurable
as this child’s hope is, it will break tomorrow?
Copyright Credit: Sandra McPherson, “Eschatology” from Radiation (New York: The Ecco Press, 1973). Copyright © 1973 by Sandra McPherson. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Source: Poetry (April 1970)