The Last Day Of The World

The phone rang. My mother answered.
“It’s the Prince of Darkness,” she shouted
up the stairs, “He needs to speak with you.”
“Tell him I’m busy,” I yelled from my room.
And indeed I was, battling entropy
the foremost task of the human condition.
“He’s being very insistent,” mother replied.
“Take a message,” I answered, tuning my banjo.
I could hear a mumbled conversation.
“He says it’s something about the fall of Man,”
my mother shouted back, obviously annoyed.
I shook my head, that pernicious little git,
always with the questions, the sly remarks,
the desperate need for verification.
“Tell him I’ll call him back,” I replied,
with no intention of ever doing so,
my mother gone quiet, the day turned cold,
something dread on the horizon rising.

---

Here/Not Here

My mother would often disappear
from this physical plane
without so much as a boo
or by-your-leave.

For seconds, hours, days,
her absence made a space in us
which would never be addressed
by God or Science.

In this unprecedented state,
my mother was neither dead nor alive —
or so we had to suppose,
her silence on the matter
as cumbersome as any monument.
A silence thickened with apprehension.
Silence, but with an edge to it.

Some things, they tell us,
should remain unknown.
We are mired in ignorance
and have given this value.
All is illusion.

And, yes, finally, one day
my mother left and never returned.
We placed a hole in the earth
and this represented our loss.
We carved her name into a stone
and this stood for human folly.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His latest book, Boxing In The Bone Orchard is available now via Frontenac House.