On the Day the World is Ending
the last of the migrant boats will arrive from
the theatres of war in which the US, Russia,
and their allies have played a leading role.

They’ll be met by men with heads like Rooster potatoes,
all deep red skins and shallow eyes,
who will still be standing on the Kentish shoreline
shaking their fist at those who’ve had the grit
to travel thousands of miles, spanning land and sea,
to escape war, persecution, poverty
shouting ‘Get the fuck back from where you came’
just as a thundering tsunami batters their bloated
bodies and drowns their hate-filled voices out.

Meanwhile, Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos
will be racing each other to Meta knows where,
while arguing, each from their private spacecraft,
about how great their contribution was to a world
now free of speech,
and which of them will be first to reach
an enlightened state of nothingness.

Priests and fanatics against abortion rights
will still be chanting ‘pro-life’ slogans
while the planet is burning
and drill-bits are still screwing the earth for oil
that will never make it to the refineries or national grids
of the countries that have always put themselves ‘first’
and till the very last were unwilling to listen or believe
the end was coming.

Then earthquakes will unearth the bones
of the ancestors to join with what remains
of the very last people to see all their children die.

All this will be just as the world discovers that
in America’s obsession with much discredited eugenics,
the only thing it ever freely traded was
Nazism back to Europe.

And as the lights go out in the fiction that is Blighty,
the Tory leadership and UK reform
will be campaigning for the leader of a ‘party’
that is forever over.
                                                           Lesley Benzie

Lesley Benzie is an Aberdonian who calls Glasgow home. Writing in Doric Scots and English she has been nominated for numerous  awards, is a Scots translator and has two poetry collections Sewn Up and Fessen/Reared reissued by Seahorse Publications, 2023.