A Reckoning
Coming at the end of a year, a decade,
ten years of trading prevarication,
all prospects closing off
as reality closes in, with half
the globe on fire, the rest in floods, how can
we reckon up accounts? We’re overdrawn,
our home mortgaged, a world’s ransom to pay.
What next? The bailiffs? They’re at the door already,
back their authority with flamethrowers,
water cannon, and irrefutable numbers.
Where to? The moon, that airless dumping-ground
for shit of all sorts? To Mars, the rusting god
of lost battles? Or out into the cosmos
which scurries away from the echo of might-have-beens?
A C Clarke‘s fifth collection, A Troubling Woman (Oversteps Books), came out in 2017. She was a winner in the Cinnamon Press 2017 pamphlet competition with War Baby. Drochaid, with Maggie Rabatski and Sheila Templeton, was recently published by Tapsalteerie.