The Apocalypse is Scientific

by Gabrielle DiMura

So many monks and friars, dead with not an answer 

to just how long the world would live on without  

them; Anabaptist mothers shaken up for nothing,  

nearly nine hundred lifetimes passed with little 

a drip of wax; Their gavels struck the stars, not suns, 

their guesses grand and mighty but ever unknowable; 

A different branding scorches now, larger than God 

and all His wrath; Who claims the power held  

by some unmoving beast to be grander than measured 

systems, charts and numbers forever omnipresent? 

Ask what realer fates will come, a battle built  

in wandering skies or the human touch of death; 

Are certain deeds unforgiven? The details lie in fallen 

angels, trenches dug for evil biddings, churning evermore; 

These, our deeds, our man's destruction whipping  

bone from bone, have surpassed apocalyptic tears  

of older folktale peasants; The kill is greater now, its timing  

ticks on quicker than the sun, which burns and burns and burns.