FIVE POEMS by GALE ACUFF
When the world ends if I’m still alive then
I won't be—I'll be dying with it, it
doesn't seem fair, other folks before me
got to die and leave the world more or less
whole behind them but if I go out when
the thing explodes or freezes or burns up
or however everything natural
ends and even what's unnatural, man
-made, I mean, it still doesn't seem so square
and what if when the world ends then Heaven
and Hell do, too? Not that that's not a good
idea but why can't we lose both of 'em
but keep Earth in the balance and not just
the center of it all but the only
all there is? Not that it's not too much now.
Nobody wants to die but of course I
haven't gone door-to-door asking though some
folks do, missionaries maybe they're called,
and I haven't mailed out a survey or
stopped folks on the street and asked them but then
we live in the countryside, it takes me
a good half-hour to walk into town for
church and Sunday School and the library
they have a lot of books and magazines
newspapers, ditto, and pretty girls in
glasses and their hair in buns and sometimes
I trek to town just to see them, then fall
in love but of course I can't marry all
of them, I'm only 10 but then it's good
exercise, walking and dying and walking back.
I’ll get to Heaven one day to be judged
then sent down to Hell where I belong, it's
good to belong to something, I guess, but
not to everything, the Republican
Party, for example, but anyway
I'm only ten years old so my best bet
is to die almost right away so that
maybe God and Jesus and the Holy
Ghost (boo!) will have mercy on me, Suffer
the little children and all that and I
used to think it meant that kids should suffer,
if Jesus is God why can't He speak plain
or is it plainly, maybe God alone
knows but Jesus is God as well but then
I'll know it all when I'm truly on fire.
I’m going to die someday and I hope
that I'll be happy then—I'm not happy
now knowing that I have to die but
when I do maybe I'll look back and think
life wasn't so bad, I'm glad it had me,
or maybe I'll be loads more satisfied
not alive anymore and I wonder
how I felt before I was ever born,
if I'm made in the image of God (God
help you, O Lord), then maybe I always
was, too, it's just that I can't remember
a goddamn thing about the life to come
that's my life now before I came to be.
Or maybe when I die I go back to
waiting to be born. I can hardly wait.
Nobody loves me, me included, I
guess, I feel closest when I hate myself,
love and hate aren't so different as long
as there's no weapon involved and
at church and Sunday School God loves me and
Jesus, too, and probably the Holy
Ghost but there's no accounting for taste, I
just want to be left alone until I
die, except for Mother and my future
wives and children and dogs and tropical
fish and in Sunday School class today I
got caught chewing gum and forced to leave but
some attention's worth an exile so next
week I'll be back to try God again, I
hate myself but Come, let us adore Him.
Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Reed, Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, The Font, Chiron Review, Poem, Adirondack Review, Florida Review, Slant, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Roanoke Review, and many other journals in a dozen countries. They have authored three books of poetry: “Buffalo Nickel,” “The Weight of the World,” and “The Story of My Lives.”