I owe my grand
existence
to a jagged
asteroid—
to a circle
that surrounds
the Yucatan,
the crater of
Chicxulub;
to all the fossils
who didn’t adapt,
had failed
to be the fittest
when it mattered.
I would surely
not be alive
if not for Hitler,
my father staying
put in a German town,
my mother in a village
of Ukraine,
never crossing paths
in an English class,
in a London
of another sort.
I have always
hated Hitler
for Holocaust,
Dresden but a cinder
because of him
and his paintings spurned,
Europe a steaming
rubble felling millions.
My Italian friends
don’t realize
if it wasn’t for
Mussolini, they’d have never
cried at birth.
Look at Hiroshima
standing tall—
unscorched by
Enola Gay,
half a billion
people that come and
go, the interchange of
faces, the names that
disappear with sleight
of hand,
replaced by happy
children
we’ll never know.
We are
ultimately born
of tragedy:
the driver just
ahead
taking the impact
nearly mine,
surviving by the
luck
of a random turn.
You say your
baby owes her breath
to a brutal rape,
your dog no
longer there
because the first
to tame a wolf
had lost a hand
to a famished bear—
forty thousand years
before the Christ.
This isn’t just an
anthem of the past—
watch the roll
of future dice, their
crash against the wall:
the ocean-
dweller creeping
from the shore,
the silence of the land,
absent of beast
and man,
eyeing remnants
of a city
long extinct,
grateful that we’ve
finally disappeared,
its initial step
like a human’s
on the moon,
still rising
on the drapes
of burning sky,
a ball of
nonchalance,
its face of bleached
indifference.
Andreas Gripp
June 29, 2024
Andreas Gripp
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