It’s Going to Be Okay
I know it will be okay
because NASA has confirmed
Stephen Hawking was right
and the world will end
probably by the year 2600,
which means we are celebrating
the birth of our children
into oblivion with instructions
to make their own children
in the path of oblivion,
as if to hope someone’s children
at some point, and therefore
all of us, will live to be
obliterated, but the children
keep being born, keep entering
the world as if it is a relief
to finally be here, screaming
from the terrible joy of it,
and we all know children
carry wisdom from a universe
none of us can revisit
or reclaim, where our pre-sight,
pre-form, pre-human, pre-vengeance
and pre-war selves may still exist
as the perfectly contented
and eternally miserable dust
of stars, and the way back
to that place is printed inside
a pocket of the brain that’s been
sewn shut one fatal stitch
at a time, one earth-day
at a time by a divine and quiet
needle that does not ask
our permission, which explains
how we begin as children
but grow into grimness
then end up desperately needing
to understand how okay it will be,
and I know it will be okay
because there was a double rainbow
glowing against a heavy storm
as it fattened and purpled
over my city this morning
and all my friends took pictures
before the power outages
and fallen trees were noted
on living maps and grids,
and now we have proof
of the irreverence of light waves
and the indiscriminate
appearance of hope to look at
on dying screens tonight,
and I know it will be okay
because I overheard a crying man
in the lobby of an animal hospital
telling the shivering one-eyed dog
beside him that it would be okay,
he promised, it would be okay,
and when I asked what the dog’s
name was, the man said
my name, said Abby,
and isn’t that ominous,
isn’t it meaningful whether I like it
or not, and isn’t it true
that it happened and my dog self
was alive and visibly comforted
by his words, shivering less,
maybe awake more, loved more,
even though dogs are dual citizens
of this universe and the one
we can’t reach back to, where
wisdom is still just another type
of common matter, which is to say
dogs—animals—consistently know
it is not okay, has never been okay
will not become okay
and yet they gather with us
in the path of disaster after disaster,
purring or playing or burrowing
happily into our warmth
because it is not survival
to pursue anything otherwise,
and I know it will be okay
because I keep dreaming
that my daughter and I are falling
through the atmosphere toward
the very real stone earth
and when she yells what’s happening to us
I take two equally crucial steps:
first, I put my body between hers
and oblivion, and second, I shout
through the guiltless but roaring silence
that it will be okay
because even in my dreams
I am learning that another answer
would be death before impact
and I contain the residue
of asteroids, I am part animal,
so are you, and so is my child,
and we have been going on
for millennia through the awful
and the sometimes okay
without ever knowing how.
*Abby E. Murray
