Love Song for the End of the World

This is a poem that has been posted on the Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate's website as one of the poems of the week this week. I'm especially interested in it as it was written by a friend of mine. I can't say I necessarily agree with some of her philosophical views on grace but I think she is a wonderful poet who can write no wrong. And so I give you Love Song for the End of the World by Katia Grubisic.

Love Song for the End of the World
by Katia Grubisic

Don’t worry — this is a poem
entirely without grace. Instead we will conceive
together of the possible ways
to end the world. Since we have managed
to make even fission
banal, let me design something like
scorpions, like vociferating recklessly
into a sandstorm, or like the sudden discovery
that a mole on your hip is a
detonator. Let us have
all of our hands and fingers cut off, be disfigured
by acid and thrown into a pigpen
in the manner of just so many concubines;
let us be the victims of the flailing
of our limbs against our own limbs,
until we tire of the carnage and walk away.
Let us die of mange, of blues guitar, of very bad puns—
whatever I come up with will never be worse
or more spectacular than the dark,
where our bodies should be left at angles—graceless,
though with some perspective
the whole pile of us could be read
like tea leaves in an inverted china cup.

If I dreamed your death
it would be in a great wind (nothing
like what you have feared)
and you would swing out like a crane
over the world, grow a skin of feathers and go
to ashes—
________________________________________

© Katia Grubisic. Unpublished poem