not with a bang but with a whimper

Apologies for the radio silence- currently balls deep in drama school applications, so ive not been thinking anything remotely poetic these past few weeks. This is a poem I wrote to be performed as spoken word alongside a devised movement piece for one of my first- round auditions.When the world ends all colossal climate-induced natural disasters will be such distant memories that they become folklore.


White sunrise on a nuclear morning

The suffocating shock-white of another withering day

We passed the night telling stories of ancient tempests

screaming battering winds

hot seas boiling over onto indifferent shores

rain like a fickle lover

falling at once in violent slats then

absenting itself for cruel desperate months


old testament chaos

rabid and vengeful

but vivid

violence in a shimmering technicolour

there is a vile delight that sits in our throats


we awake on sterile barren ground

and try not to look at the footprints in the sand

to hear the howl of dark ancestral spectres

catching on the aimless wind


there were others here before us

we see them now only in the relics they have left

rippled and vague as a narcissian reflection

but we know them

we know every failing of their eroded souls

by the hell they have left us in.






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