Poetry for a New Millennium

No Tomorrow

And Art Bell says don't touch that dial,
more UFO's coming down the light years,
the extra terrestrials, alien intelligences to spin crop circles for the millennium.
Are you overweight? You're out of your mind if you don't buy this radio
with a light and a crank and a crackpot hoard of food for Y2K;
the cans won't leak even though the world ends
- don't spin that dial - here in the Nevada desert with
tanks of water and saucers of ET's coming right up.

And at my window the chickadees take their turn on the dancing twigs,
the bottle spinning under its saucer roof, bottle, birds and black oil seeds
weightless in the swimming air, black beaks kissing black mouth,
dropping one by one to crack the shells and pry the meat and rise again to join the queue.
In the hungry hours at the end of light, their holes won't leak.

©Susannah Anderson, 1999
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But The Millennium Really Began in 1996

The math is simple if you work it out
on paper: Jesus' birth we designate
as zero, add two thousand: not a doubt --
the end is coming. Stop! we've got the date
all wrong: King Herod slaughtered innocents
in four B.C., when Jesus was a tot:
subtract five years, and add one, making sense
of monkish calculations without nought.

Archbishop Ussher, summing up begats,
found Adam springing from the clay unborn
four thousand years and four B.C., his stats
disputable, perhaps, still do adorn
millennial theories: four plus two make six;
three zeros; measure that in days to reach
the Sabbath, says St. Peter. That would fix
the rapture, usher in the age of peace
and plenty, days when lambs may safely mix
with lions: nineteen hundred ninety six.

©Susannah Anderson, January 1999
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