Vapor
Sara Eliza Johnson
When it happens the rain
is not black but powder.
A noise bleeds from your ears
and everything quakes
alive inside you:
the circuits of the flowers
lighting up across a meadow,
the nanoglow
of a sea years from here
– :And like the flash
across an event horizon,
your thought disappears
:- and then the mind
threshed, and then the brain
a perfume of proto-pollen:
a microscopic cloud
radiating in a geranium
in the meadow of another country:
a powder the elk eat
in the sudden black rain.
About this poem
“I have been fascinated lately by all the ways the world could end, and particularly the precise moment of an apocalyptic cataclysm: the asteroid hitting the ocean, the supervolcano’s pyroclastic flow. While writing this poem, I was thinking about the moment of nuclear annihilation, when the body vaporizes, its matter and person (seemingly) instantaneously transformed. But into what? I suppose in that way it is another poem about where we go when we die – not only as individuals, but as a species.” – Sara Eliza Johnson
About Sara Eliza Johnson
Sara Eliza Johnson is the author of “Bone Map” (Milkweed Editions, 2014). She is a second-year poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Sara Eliza Johnson. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
