on the day the world ends

Today is April 1, which seems pretty bizarre since time no longer has any meaning. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful spring day here in New York City, and it's the first day of National Poetry Month. For anybody new (is there anybody new? after thirteen years that seems sort of doubtful, but you're very welcome here), that means I try to post a poem a day for the month of April. I almost never manage all thirty days, but I do my best; I also try not to repeat poems I've posted before, except in special circumstances.

I think the challenge, in this year of global pandemic, is going to be variety—I am sure I will be posting some depressing poems, war poems and grief poems and loss poems, and probably quite a few poems about finding joy in small things and perseverance and triumphing against the odds. It just seems...likely. But I'll try to shake it up a little, as much as one can when living in a fairly constant state of intense anxiety. The good news, at least for me, is that I find poetry to be enormously helpful when dealing with complex emotions and hard times.

I've been doing this since 2007, when I was 21 and a senior in college. This April I turn 35, and it's kind of incredible to look back on all these years of Aprils as a chronicle of my life and the world I've lived in and what's changed and what's stayed the same; a lot of it is pretty crappy, but a lot of it is pretty beautiful, too. I don't mean to make it a bigger thing than it is, but I feel very aware, this year in particular, of what it can mean to keep that kind of record. I guess this is my quarantine journal, in its own way.

Let's start, this year, with Czeslaw Milosz:

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
       
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Warsaw, 1944

—Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), "A Song on the End of the World," translated by Anthony Milosz, and in this case from The Collected Poems: 1931-1987 by Czeslaw Milosz (Ecco Press, 1988).