All The Ends of The World I've Known

Jupiter and Saturn are in conjunction

Look out at the night sky and you'll see

A Christmas Star atop this awful year

that was the end of the world, again

It was another conjunction of planets

that heralded my first end of the world

back when I was five years old and

which I can find no evidence for, now

But my dad's friend said it was so and 

I believed him- you would have too-

with his moustache and doberman pinscher

and a telescope he got from a Sears catalogue

He said all nine planets were about to align

and that sadly, this would destabilize the gravity

of the entire Solar System, and you can see how

the Earth therefore is doomed, utterly doomed

My dad said it was fine and I didn't need to worry

But what kid ever heeded that advice?

So I looked out at the night sky

and waited for the end of the world

Eventually nothing happened and we moved on

to the next inevitable end of the world

of which there was no shortage in the era

of acid rain, ozone holes, Chernobyl and Reagan

The end of the Cold War was so close but we thought 

it was actually much closer and that it would end

in nuclear fire today, or tomorrow at the latest

No one expected the Iron Curtain to fall like it did

Y2K came and went, and 911 was bad

But we weathered it and 2008 and even

the Mayan Calendar reared its head in 2012

And the lesson is, eventually nothing happens

I passed this lesson on to my kids not quite a year ago

when we kept hearing about this novel coronavirus 

Don't worry, I said, eventually nothing happens

and we will forget about this and life will go on

And damn, if that wasn't the worst advice 

I've ever given as a dad. I beg forgiveness-

All the ends of the world I've known 

didn't prepare me for this one, or the next.