“The Simple Prophecy” – Giorgio de Chirico
The world ends
not with noise
but with the corner of a street
that leads nowhere.
Squares remain empty
like the interiors of thoughts
when you forget their names.
“On Catastrophe” – W.G. Sebald
At some point
memory becomes an archive of ashes.
Cities continue to function
as if nothing has happened,
which is the most precise definition
of the end.
“Cosmic Silence” – Yeats
I turn my head toward the stars
and no one answers.
Not because there is no voice
but because the reply
is too slow to be spoken.
“The Sun After” – Emily Dickinson
After the end
the sun rises as usual.
This is the most unsettling fact
we have ever described.
“Climate Elegy” – contemporary fragment
The sea rises
not like punishment
but like a memory returning.
Fish change direction
without asking history.
“The Man Who Waited for the End” – existential fragment
He waited for years
for a great event.
When it did not come,
he began to live it daily
in small doses:
in notifications,
in news,
in silences.
W. B. Yeats – The Second Coming (1919)
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
T. S. Eliot – The Waste Land (1922)
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
Percy Bysshe Shelley – Ozymandias (1818)
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare.
Anna Akhmatova – Requiem (1935–40)
No, not under the vault of alien skies,
Not under the shelter of alien wings—
I was with my people then,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.
Georg Trakl – Grodek (1914)
At evening the autumn forests resound
With deadly weapons, the golden plains
And blue lakes, above which the sun
Rolls more darkly;
Sylvia Plath – Edge (1963)
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment.
Robinson Jeffers – The Day Is a Poem of Death
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.
Nâzım Hikmet
To live like a tree, alone and free
and like a forest in brotherhood.
Paul Celan – Todesfuge (1944–45)
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at noon and morning we drink it at night...
Allen Ginsberg – Howl (1955)
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...
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