We have had many visions:
the world dried like a raisin,
cracked mudflats or windblown deserts
as far as a satellite's eye could see;

or drowned liked a child in the bathtub,
sunken spires of skyscrapers
the substrate of coral reefs,
and on the liquid surface, silence;

or frozen like an ancient alpine traveler,
the rags of roads and cities
clawed to shreds by blizzards,
awakened glaciers grinding all to rubble.

But we have not had the vision
of dust-borne darkness, the world curtained
by meteors, volcanoes, or nuclear blast,
the cold, the asphyxiation, the extinction.

S. R. Compton is an occasional poet; in the last century, he appeared in Star*Line, Velocities, and Alba. He works as a senior copy editor at PC World magazine in San Francisco.